00:00:00.00 Mark McCracken do it. 00:00:00.13 Michael Have you got a drink, Jess? 00:00:02.12 Mark McCracken There you go. A nice drink of water. 00:00:03.42 Jess ah 00:00:03.70 Michael Is that a massive water? That's a big gin, I hope. 00:00:05.55 Jess That is a massive gin, yeah. 00:00:06.79 Mark McCracken Oh, very nice. 00:00:07.16 Michael the 00:00:08.80 Mark McCracken Very nice. 00:00:08.81 Michael Cheers, everyone. 00:00:09.12 Jess You've got a Christmas tree already! 00:00:09.75 Mark McCracken I've got a Yeah, well, I'm in I'm in the garden office. 00:00:11.70 Michael I know, it looks really cool. 00:00:13.75 Mark McCracken So I figured it's not technically in the house. And I'm not going to get a lot of stick for this. So normally what happens is I get to to like some point in November, and I'm like, ah I'm having a shitty day, so I'll be like, I'll put the tree up and that'll put me in a really good place. 00:00:30.07 Michael a 00:00:31.21 Mark McCracken You probably can only do it once in November, but ah it works great. So yeah, this is my tree. And my mum found a nice decoration that we went to. I like going to Tottenham Court Road, and I find round the corner from that, there's there's a Gibson shop. 00:00:44.26 Mark McCracken And like, yeah, you know the one? 00:00:44.51 Michael Oh, yeah, yeah, I know where that is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 00:00:46.77 Mark McCracken It's very nice because every guitar in there is like over five grand. So it was very expensive, but they've got like a little tiny miniature and you get guitar, which was ah which was pretty cool. 00:00:53.37 Michael ah Cool. and There are, there are us camera size. 00:00:56.10 Mark McCracken and i think the I think just the, I i don't know, she didn't she didn't tell me, but I think her the little ornament that she got me for the tree was like 70 pounds. 00:01:00.30 Michael Probably about how much my first guitar cost. 00:01:05.57 Mark McCracken And I was like, that's that's that's a lot, mum. 00:01:07.43 Michael well Okay, ah is I think that is more than my first bass. 00:01:07.94 Mark McCracken I don't know, she didn't tell me. She did she bought it when I was downstairs and I was like, that's egregious, but it it did does look very nice. 00:01:12.12 Michael Very nice. 00:01:15.16 Mark McCracken Anyway, well, we're here, go ahead. 00:01:16.84 Jess Quick question. I can see your audio. 00:01:21.43 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:01:22.08 Jess Mine's just a flat line. 00:01:24.41 Mark McCracken We can, we we can hear you just fine. 00:01:25.65 Jess Okay. 00:01:25.93 Mark McCracken So I presume that it's, it's all, it's all going to work itself out, presumably. 00:01:26.55 Michael yeah 00:01:28.07 Jess All right. 00:01:29.57 Michael your Your camera looks really high def as well. Have you got like a really, really good webcam or something? 00:01:33.54 Jess no No, it's just my MacBook. 00:01:35.32 Michael Okay. 00:01:35.81 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:01:36.21 Jess And the portrait that I was trying to like blur out the background or something, but this was the best thing to do. 00:01:39.62 Michael It works. 00:01:41.07 Mark McCracken Yeah. So yeah, I've got a, I've got, I've got a San Miguel to watch your lovely gin. 00:01:43.94 Michael I feel like I've got the worst setup. Have you got something to go? 00:01:47.73 Jess your 00:01:48.12 Mark McCracken So do you, do you actually have a desk? 00:01:48.61 Jess um 00:01:50.52 Michael No, I need to show you this to see how budget it is. 00:01:52.60 Mark McCracken yeah 00:01:53.15 Michael and and 00:01:54.40 Mark McCracken Your budget. Oh wow. 00:01:59.60 Jess night 00:02:00.70 Mark McCracken You just got your like your laptop on a chair. 00:02:01.30 Michael That's it, there's nothing else in the whole room. 00:02:03.46 Mark McCracken Wow. so It's pretty empty. yeah but So i've been I've been dying to know how many plugs do you have in your and your and in your office? 00:02:05.37 Michael Yeah. 00:02:11.04 Michael Well, I've got two double sockets and I just put the plug into one of them for the first time. It's really wonky, so one might fall off, so it won't be down to one double socket, so. 00:02:21.33 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:02:24.57 Mark McCracken That is is pretty grim, man. How many plugs do you normally have in your in in your workspace? 00:02:27.04 Michael I was really happy about this and I don't know what's happened and you pulled it down and you said like, You're at 18, that's new. york 00:02:33.43 Mark McCracken ah Two double sockets in your workspace. 00:02:35.43 Jess Yeah, yeah. 00:02:36.12 Mark McCracken So so i've just I've just built this garden office, and it was quite ah quite ah quite a long process. And when we were first getting codes for it, we talked to a few different companies, some independent people and some big companies. We talked to one of the big companies and said, oh yeah, we can we can do that all a of this. 00:02:49.80 Mark McCracken And I said, OK, tell me about like extras and stuff, because I'm i'm into my extras. And they said, how much of like x what what comes to standard? Oh yeah, you get six double sockets at standard. I said, six? 00:03:00.51 Mark McCracken That's not enough. How much is the extra plugs? So how much did they charge? 00:03:03.66 Jess you can be in 00:03:04.79 Mark McCracken So um how much did they charge for one extra double socket? 00:03:09.32 Michael 90 quid. 00:03:10.22 Mark McCracken Yes, literally 90 pounds. 00:03:12.07 Michael Same, same as the, no, no, it's just what what our guys cost to say. 00:03:12.11 Mark McCracken I must have told you this already. I was like, this is a gracious 90 quid. So anyway, ive I went with this independent guy that I know before, and I got no fewer than 18 double sockets installed in my garden office. 00:03:24.86 Michael But, but why? 00:03:25.13 Jess Oh my god. 00:03:26.27 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:03:26.64 Jess What have you done? 00:03:26.86 Michael Just, just, just in case you're like, just, you never have to run the extension leader anywhere again. 00:03:27.25 Mark McCracken And then there are at least, yeah, well. ah um Yeah, and you know the desk came with two extensions built in, and I've got one but've got two more extensions. I've got like 55 plugs in here, so I'm pretty plugged out, so um'm I'm chuffed a bit. 00:03:38.70 Michael and 00:03:41.21 Mark McCracken so 00:03:41.46 Michael Cause I think you're kind of meant to get like a UPS and stuff. Who is that? 00:03:44.58 Mark McCracken ah what but see what's what's A UPS? 00:03:45.04 Michael A UPS, uninterrupted, uninterruptible power supply or stuff like that. 00:03:49.89 Mark McCracken Oh, I've got like a proper... 00:03:51.21 Michael Or like surge surge protectors and things. 00:03:52.33 Mark McCracken I've got like a, well, I don't know, but I've got a proper consumer unit. 00:03:53.52 Michael and 00:03:56.13 Mark McCracken So it's like the same thing you'd have inside in your house. I got one of those outside. 00:03:58.64 Michael Like a breaker. Okay. 00:04:00.19 Mark McCracken Yeah, yeah. So that's, it's pretty cool. 00:04:01.46 Michael Fair enough. You probably geeked out. 00:04:02.79 Mark McCracken Anyways, anyways, we're here, we're here, we're doing it. And we're already probably halfway through it. We're delayed. I've been sick for a couple of weeks. Mike's been on jury duty, but it's still going on. 00:04:13.89 Mark McCracken So, still going. 00:04:13.88 Michael yep still going yeah i know you'll have to uh you'll have to message me on monday tuesday looks like it's probably gonna go on till next week so 00:04:14.66 Jess Oh, I was hoping to hear the result, to hear the gossip. 00:04:15.41 Mark McCracken So he's keeping tight-lipped. yeah yeah we get sadly no gossip so maybe next time maybe next time yeah yeah find out it's gone yeah you're gonna get him still trial he's very tight lipped jess you were on holiday where did you go yeah was it was it working what did you get up to it's 00:04:21.24 Jess So you're not deliberating yet. It's still trial. 00:04:32.74 Jess I went to Amsterdam for a few days. Yeah. Yeah. like Not what everyone thinks you're going to get up to when you go down. 00:04:43.62 Michael Yeah. 00:04:44.58 Mark McCracken just a normal trip to amsterdam 00:04:44.99 Michael Yeah. 00:04:46.52 Jess No, I had some family visiting. 00:04:47.88 Michael So Texas, Texas, the real stuff in the chat. 00:04:52.86 Mark McCracken um Yeah, well, it's the first one so we should probably introduce each other. Michael, who are you and where are you from and where do you live and what do you do? 00:04:58.36 Michael Uh, okay. Uh, yeah, Michael, and I live in South London. Uh, I'm, I keep wanting to say software engineer. I'm a, I'm a consultant. 00:05:10.12 Michael I'm, I'm, I'm still an engineer. 00:05:11.00 Mark McCracken consultant 00:05:11.58 Michael I'm a, I'm a consultant. 00:05:12.07 Mark McCracken Consultant. 00:05:12.43 Michael Now I've been, uh, consulting since March. 00:05:16.17 Mark McCracken Lovely. 00:05:16.51 Michael ah My current gig is I'm a site reliability engineering lead, which is pretty cool. 00:05:20.94 Jess Nice. 00:05:21.76 Mark McCracken Very nice. 00:05:22.92 Michael So quite enjoy that. 00:05:22.92 Jess That sounds 00:05:23.16 Mark McCracken so it's it sounds It sounds fancy, yeah. 00:05:23.88 Michael So yeah, but for the last like two and a half weeks, I don't think I've gone any anywhere near any tech. So kind of feel like I'm massively out of the loop on everything. So I need to get back into it. 00:05:32.36 Mark McCracken eating a Are you doing a lot of PowerPoint? 00:05:35.55 Michael No, no, just i because I've been on this jury service thing. So um I've just kind of been 00:05:38.64 Mark McCracken All right, OK, yeah, Farah, you've been off work. um Somebody... 00:05:42.29 Michael I haven't done any coding, I haven't been on any terminals, I haven't done any of that stuff, so. 00:05:46.78 Mark McCracken Somebody sent me a message earlier today saying, do you want to go for a pint after to work? And I was like, I can't. I'm quite busy. I've got you know the podcast and other things. You could do a very quick one. I said, yeah. She said, can you do a PowerPoint? And I said, I've made this lovely ah logo, which so which I thought was just just great. 00:05:59.29 Michael Oh yeah, PowerPoint, yeah. 00:05:59.56 Jess ah ah 00:06:03.40 Mark McCracken um Yeah, anyway, well, I'm Mark, ah Mark McCracken from Northern Ireland, which is a funny accent, and I live in North London, um because I think that South London is the worst side. 00:06:19.19 Michael two against one mark. 00:06:20.38 Mark McCracken Yeah, well, um I might number it this time, but I'm sure I'll find a guest that's, you know, afford to live up here. um I'm a contractor i'm currently working at a large telco doing program management ah which is a little bit different from what I normally do normally it's very engineeringy but yeah 00:06:37.04 Michael I think you've told us that you'll be a mark. 00:06:38.90 Mark McCracken I have indeed, yeah. 00:06:40.66 Michael Some ago. 00:06:40.79 Mark McCracken ah Yes, my beer is a San Miguel, especially. It was the only, it was one of two choices in the fridge. It was that or a Madri. I didn't go out of my way to get a beer because I've been, I've had a sensitive stomach. 00:06:51.29 Mark McCracken So I've been advised by chat GPT, seeing as I can get a real GP, I've got a GP, tea. To go easy with the food, have just bananas and apple sauce. 00:07:01.75 Mark McCracken I'm like, who has apple sauce to hand? 00:07:03.61 Michael Apple sauce. 00:07:03.76 Mark McCracken And don't drink any alcohol or caffeine. um So I'm trying to, Not very successfully, trying not to drink. 00:07:09.72 Michael Yeah. 00:07:11.79 Mark McCracken Jess, your turn. Where are you? What's your name? Where are you from? Where do you live? 00:07:15.55 Jess What was my name? 00:07:15.92 Mark McCracken What do you do? 00:07:16.25 Jess My name is Bess. I'm from Australia, but I live in South London. Actually not too far from Michael. 00:07:22.53 Mark McCracken Oh, really? You guys quite close? 00:07:23.85 Jess Yeah. 00:07:24.68 Michael yeah 00:07:24.97 Jess Yeah. 00:07:25.77 Mark McCracken Oh. 00:07:27.47 Jess Yeah. In South London. 00:07:30.01 Mark McCracken Lovely. 00:07:29.99 Jess Because it's awesome. oh 00:07:31.71 Michael And you have a tube as well. 00:07:31.84 Jess all Yeah. 00:07:34.37 Michael so there are too hang 00:07:35.01 Jess And a train. It's amazing. 00:07:36.45 Michael yeah 00:07:37.21 Mark McCracken Very fancy. 00:07:39.23 Jess ah And yeah, I'm a senior staff engineer, staff architect. I don't know. 00:07:45.40 Mark McCracken Senior staff engineer. 00:07:46.23 Jess You're pretty similar to me, so. 00:07:48.47 Michael So you're talking now is senior stuff and senior stuff that's like the highest isn't it? 00:07:49.05 Mark McCracken Very fancy. 00:07:51.43 Jess Yeah. 00:07:54.78 Michael Yeah, yes 00:07:55.59 Mark McCracken I thought it went like ah thought it went like no junior to mid to senior engineer and then it goes to staff and then it goes to senior staff. 00:07:57.82 Jess Yeah, I mean. 00:08:05.20 Jess Yeah, and well, my boss is the principal. 00:08:05.68 Michael yeah 00:08:06.41 Mark McCracken Is there anything after that? 00:08:08.93 Michael okay okay 00:08:09.47 Mark McCracken Principle, ah. 00:08:09.89 Jess Yeah. 00:08:11.23 Mark McCracken See if I added extra layers. 00:08:11.32 Jess But then you can manage people and that sucks. 00:08:14.29 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:08:14.63 Jess Sorry. 00:08:16.87 Mark McCracken Yeah, so I guess we should do a bit of a, how do you say it about Jess? So we got some questions for Jess. Find a bit more about you. And then we got some big topics and then we got some news. So Jess, I have some questions. 00:08:30.63 Mark McCracken Can you tell me about the first bit of code you ever wrote? 00:08:31.03 Michael Yes. Okay, okay. 00:08:33.59 Jess I was thinking about this earlier today because I was like, I don't think I wrote any real code until I was in university, but probably the first code I wrote was on Myspace, writing the font nice and the flashy gifs, and just scrolling on keys and stuff like that back in the day. 00:08:46.41 Michael a 00:08:49.83 Mark McCracken Oh, very nice. Like a marquee. 00:08:53.00 Michael you had a spice Did you Did you a space on my space? 00:08:55.47 Jess Huh? Yeah. 00:08:57.95 Michael Do you remember what kind of content was on there? 00:08:58.83 Jess Oh god, I don't 00:09:01.21 Michael Or did it cringe? then 00:09:03.71 Jess die of cringe if I ever saw it. 00:09:05.87 Mark McCracken yeah 00:09:05.83 Jess I hope it's been scrubbed from the internet by now. know. 00:09:09.84 Mark McCracken Well, I never had a Maestro or something. I went straight to Bebo, which didn't go very well. that's where I sort of found out that I was not a very popular child. 00:09:21.21 Mark McCracken um How did you start off, so if you started off writing some code at your university, how did you start off professionally? What was your first job? What'd you do? 00:09:28.27 Jess um So I actually kind of did a bit of a detour on my way to getting to tech because I kind of went to high school and I was like I have no idea what I want to do and I kind of had decent grades so it was like I don't want to get a real job so I better go to university. 00:09:39.18 Mark McCracken Correct answer. 00:09:45.30 Jess I was like I don't know what I want to do and I went and talked to the counselor and they were like oh there's all these things. Oh, the law sounds interesting. You know, I really like law and order. That sounds, that sounds cool. I'm your lawyer. 00:09:56.32 Jess um So I did that for like ah three years and then were like, I want to be a lawyer. 00:09:59.66 Mark McCracken Wow. 00:10:00.43 Michael I didn't know, I didn't know. 00:10:02.60 Jess um Dropped out of university much to my family's disappointment. went and worked at like a ah fuel station for a while and just worked in retail and hated it. um And then worked as a receptionist for a while and hated that until I was like, yeah okay, you need to go back to university and like get a real job. So I had made friends with the IT t guy at work and I was like, your job sounds way more interesting than being a receptionist. It's like, tell me about what you do. So he was like, tell him. 00:10:35.51 Jess to Why not? I'm going to do that. And I was like, I'm going to make websites. I'm going to make, you know, back to my MySpace days. 00:10:43.52 Mark McCracken Nice. 00:10:44.12 Michael Yeah. 00:10:44.61 Jess I'm going to make nice fancy looking websites with scrolling markings on them. 00:10:51.05 Jess No. 00:10:51.12 Mark McCracken Have you ever used a marquee since? 00:10:53.46 Jess no 00:10:54.05 Mark McCracken yeah 00:10:55.41 Jess Thank God. um So yeah, I went back to university and got and a degree in IT. It's not even like cuinna computer science. So um yeah. 00:11:05.12 Mark McCracken A degree in like ticketing systems and like first line IT, like helping people with their windows and working. 00:11:10.99 Jess my I did programming, I did networking, you know, I did the standard stuff. 00:11:15.50 Mark McCracken Oh, wow. 00:11:16.30 Jess I just didn't do compilers, even did some electrical engineering, but yeah, kind of managed to get 00:11:23.10 Michael sounds like Sounds like computer science. 00:11:25.11 Jess It sounds like, but it was cold information technology. 00:11:25.34 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:11:27.33 Michael OK. 00:11:28.02 Jess So I was like, okay, whatever. 00:11:28.70 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:11:29.56 Michael and 00:11:30.76 Jess Got credit for a bunch of law subjects. as a and so um And then graduated after like a a year and a half or something. 00:11:38.28 Mark McCracken yeah 00:11:39.32 Jess And then actually met a my first employer at the careers fair at the university. 00:11:45.32 Mark McCracken Oh wow. 00:11:46.58 Jess Yeah. 00:11:47.10 Mark McCracken Those are actually good for stuff? 00:11:47.37 Jess um yeah Yeah. 00:11:49.90 Mark McCracken I thought it was just a big marketing scam for people to get out for the day. 00:11:50.32 Jess I mean, that's me. 00:11:54.52 Jess ah who I was i was ah very young and very ah enthusiastic, like I'd just discovered tech and it was the most awesome thing in the world. And I was like, oh my God, I could program, this is so cool. 00:12:05.81 Mark McCracken if 00:12:07.13 Jess And so I think I was like gushing about how much I loved fucking Java or something. I was like, do you want a job? And I was like, yeah, I'm finished and I'm going to need a real job. 00:12:19.08 Jess So I ended up with a few offers, but they gave me the best offer. and Yeah, I went to work for a company that did um the land title system for a couple of Australian states and planning applications and things like that. 00:12:34.50 Mark McCracken Ah. 00:12:34.90 Jess um So it was like government stuff, but, you know, web app. 00:12:39.48 Mark McCracken It's all right. 00:12:41.04 Michael is Is that the last time you gushed about tech? The way you said it sounded like I don't do that anymore. 00:12:44.37 Jess oh um well Oh, I think it's the big corporations that have, uh, got that out of me. 00:12:50.95 Michael have 00:12:51.24 Mark McCracken Beat that out of you. 00:12:55.38 Jess Um, but yeah, I worked there for like five years and loved it. So, yeah. 00:12:59.02 Mark McCracken Wicked. So how did you meet Michael? 00:13:03.67 Jess Ooh. I was trying to think about this actually. Like, when did we first meet? 00:13:09.26 Michael I think I'd just come back from, I think I'd just come back from traveling, I think. 00:13:09.29 Jess Cause. 00:13:12.83 Jess That's right. Yeah. 00:13:14.35 Michael And I think there's a bunch of new people and kind of feel like maybe there was a drinks thing and I think maybe we'll chat about Ramstein or offspring or I think we're talking about Ramstein. 00:13:14.65 Jess You know what year that was? 00:13:23.74 Mark McCracken i' so 00:13:25.86 Jess that uh that rings a bell yeah 00:13:26.60 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:13:29.51 Michael I think I even remember what we were talking about as well. Do you? You do. that has come back Mark, you need to look this one up. 00:13:34.98 Mark McCracken right 00:13:37.75 Mark McCracken yeah So what what am but what am I looking up? 00:13:39.57 Michael it like ah Ramstein box set dildo like maybe not on your work account so yeah I think it was that wasn't it is that I have have a memory of that but maybe I don't 00:13:43.49 Jess but 00:13:46.06 Mark McCracken Okay. Yeah, maybe not on the work account. Okay. 00:13:51.43 Jess we doing I mean, I remember having that conversation. I don't know if that's the first conversation we had, but yeah. I don't 00:13:58.73 Mark McCracken So did you guys work together much? 00:14:02.48 Michael think so I don't remember working together I don't which team were you in you were in admin or 00:14:02.85 Jess know why. 00:14:03.88 Mark McCracken Uh, one of those things where you just cross paths with people. Yeah. My last member stuff. 00:14:09.77 Jess um 00:14:10.18 Michael No, I was an admin. 00:14:10.72 Jess Yeah, admin member. 00:14:14.10 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:14:14.73 Jess Yeah. 00:14:15.84 Mark McCracken Um, 00:14:16.48 Jess And then you were in like core platform. 00:14:17.31 Michael There's a guy called Carlos that was an admin. I feel like I worked with him. 00:14:21.25 Jess o 00:14:21.62 Michael I can't remember. I'm kind of, I got such a shit memory, but I don't the only think we worked in teams that had anything to do with each other anyway. 00:14:22.57 Jess one at 00:14:25.34 Mark McCracken so. 00:14:25.37 Jess yeah 00:14:28.90 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:14:28.91 Jess No, the first the team I remember you being on where we actually sort of would interact a bit was when you were on the core platform team. 00:14:36.90 Michael Okay. 00:14:37.92 Jess um But then, I don't know, you did you move to, ah what's it? 00:14:44.92 Michael I kind of moved to infrastructure after a bit. 00:14:46.35 Jess In front of, yeah. 00:14:47.26 Michael Yeah. 00:14:48.14 Jess yeah 00:14:48.21 Mark McCracken Yeah, that would be that be when I met you. 00:14:49.03 Michael Yeah. 00:14:50.37 Mark McCracken I'm sure somebody told me, go and ask Michael for something. That's exactly what it was. I was trying to implement OAuth. 00:14:56.72 Michael Okay. Okay. 00:14:56.85 Mark McCracken and struggling because Bartek said, yeah, I think i think what Bartek... 00:14:58.76 Michael I want you talk to me. I know nothing about it. I've never ever known anything about that. I think they were just trying to flog you off on anyone else. 00:15:05.43 Mark McCracken So Bartek was the head of enterprise IT t and I knew that he knew things and he would occasionally help me or find some way of getting rid of me. um And i um sure i was building I was building this application at the time and I had to do OAuth for like the first time ever. 00:15:16.63 Jess hobbing welcome to my 00:15:22.35 Mark McCracken And I think maybe it was him that said, go and ask ask Michael, he knows about that. He's just come off some other team that's done some OAuth stuff. And I was like, all right, okay. And he sent me over to you and you, foolishly helped me and answered my questions, thus began long a long period of several years of me coming to Pastor Michael for random advice on all all sorts of infrastructure things. 00:15:41.26 Jess I was going to say, Someone once told me to go to Michael and then I never went to Michael. 00:15:49.51 Jess When you eventually left, I was like, no, who am I going to ask now? 00:15:49.58 Michael going 00:15:52.94 Jess And I was like, Phil? 00:15:54.35 Michael kind of feel like there's some stuff i know but but definite oil anyway 00:15:57.43 Mark McCracken Yeah, it was, it was all things CICD. 00:15:58.35 Michael yeah I think it's scary. 00:15:59.79 Mark McCracken i I'm sure Bartek kept inventing more and more hurdles for me before I could release my application kept saying, no, no, no, you've got, you've got to have automated pipelines. I'm like, what's an automated pipeline? 00:16:10.67 Jess but 00:16:10.94 Mark McCracken My friend said, so ah I said, so here's what you need. 00:16:13.11 Michael It's scary when you think 00:16:15.10 Mark McCracken Go and talk to Michael again. And I was like, Oh, yeah. 00:16:18.03 Michael I was going to say it's scary when you think about how long I'd done this stuff was. 00:16:21.88 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:16:21.97 Michael like That was probably, I don't know, over a decade. 00:16:22.75 Jess It's terrifying. 00:16:26.27 Jess Yeah. 00:16:26.66 Mark McCracken Yeah, well know it that no, it wasn't quite. 00:16:27.23 Michael Probably, or or around that or something. 00:16:29.84 Jess Well, I remember you helping me prep for my architect interview, and that has to be eight years ago, seven, eight years 00:16:35.24 Michael ya Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. 00:16:40.05 Mark McCracken Yeah. um So what are you doing now, Jess? What are you up to at work at the moment? Have you got any recent interesting or upcoming stuff you can talk about? 00:16:50.35 Jess At the moment, I'm just killing a giant legacy monolith. 00:16:54.66 Mark McCracken That is interesting. 00:16:55.76 Jess Yes, slowly. 00:16:56.82 Mark McCracken Is it hard? As in, is it quite challenging? 00:17:01.01 Jess Yes, because the reason we still have it is because every previous time someone's tried to kill it, they've just gone, oh, this is too hard. There's just too many things in it. 00:17:11.60 Jess There's too many connections. We'll just leave it. 00:17:14.33 Mark McCracken Taking a little chip. 00:17:14.45 Michael do you Do you see that as a challenge? 00:17:14.97 Jess that little bit awesome 00:17:15.77 Michael is that Is that making you want to be the person who does it? 00:17:18.75 Jess Yes. 00:17:19.54 Michael Yeah, I get that. 00:17:19.67 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:17:20.52 Jess I had to feel the pain of dealing with this system. So once that happened, then I was like, right. that It and needs to be killed. 00:17:26.15 Mark McCracken the Nice. 00:17:26.28 Michael You want the kudos of... 00:17:30.51 Jess So I'm hoping next year we go kill off a few more things like that. Something very satisfying about killing a piece of software that everybody hates. 00:17:37.99 Mark McCracken Japanese. 00:17:42.05 Michael I think I've... think i know which one you're talking about and i think i remember when i left thinking like i'm so annoyed that that thing's outlived me i remember thinking like really wanted to like have been past it all and i didn't say good luck let me know how it goes 00:17:51.36 Jess but 00:17:57.98 Jess Yeah, it will be. 00:17:58.82 Mark McCracken Um, so do you have any successful or failed side projects? 00:17:59.46 Jess there 00:18:05.70 Jess No, I've got a maybe slightly hot take on on side projects, which is that I don't do them. 00:18:10.55 Mark McCracken Yeah. What's your, what's your hot take on side projects? 00:18:13.85 Jess And I never really have, because like while you know I went through my phase of being like, oh my god, I love tech so much and I'm so passionate about it, you know these days maybe slightly less. 00:18:22.58 Mark McCracken yeah 00:18:27.19 Jess I just don't want to do tech stuff outside of work most of the time. So, and I think it's kind of like, it's a little bit weird and maybe slightly toxic that there seems to be this expectation that if you're in tech, you've got to do side projects and that ask you about it in interviews and shit. 00:18:32.81 Mark McCracken Fair. 00:18:45.82 Jess I'm like, God, life outside of work. 00:18:47.74 Mark McCracken the 00:18:50.11 Jess I don't like shut down my computer and then open my other computer so I can start doing more coding. but 00:18:55.27 Mark McCracken Yeah, pretty fair. 00:18:55.91 Jess um ah do I ah don't mind reading stuff and keeping up with things outside of work. um But yeah, i mostly I mostly just do the tech at work. 00:19:05.91 Mark McCracken Lovely. like Do you have any miscellaneous interests outside of work? 00:19:09.09 Jess Miscellaneous interests. um ah So I like Dungeons and Dragons. 00:19:10.70 Mark McCracken Very miscellaneous. 00:19:15.80 Mark McCracken Oh, wow. 00:19:15.83 Jess I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group this year, which has been fun because I've never done that before. But I am a gamer, so you know I've always wondered what that would be like. 00:19:21.73 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:19:26.07 Mark McCracken Is it awesome? 00:19:27.27 Jess It's awesome. 00:19:29.42 Mark McCracken Let's get to like nerd out of it. 00:19:31.32 Jess Playing make believe, but as an adult. 00:19:35.25 Jess And you just get a group of friends together and you like have them all the time and eat snacks and drink and like create all your own in jokes and memes and stuff like that. So yeah, it's really fun. 00:19:46.64 Jess I would highly recommend it. 00:19:47.42 Mark McCracken It sounds awesome. ah've I've seen a few groups and I've thought, is that quite nerdy? Is that going to take me like a long time to get into? Is this going to be a big investment in time? Because I don't know if I've got a big investment in time, but it sounds like a great investment in a lot of time, but worth it. 00:20:02.93 Jess It's worth it. And like, yeah, there's, it there's obviously a learning curve, but if you're with a group that's like fairly chill, then, you know, you pick it up as you go. um 00:20:12.38 Mark McCracken So you need somebody to experience to start with. You got to just. 00:20:14.82 Jess Yeah, that helps. 00:20:16.03 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:20:16.28 Jess That helps. Or launch people who don't know what the hell they're doing and then it doesn't matter. 00:20:17.54 Mark McCracken All right. 00:20:20.40 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:20:22.96 Michael Can you go, so I went to, I went with Jess, my local pub did a Dungeons and Dragons, what would you call it Jess? 00:20:23.24 Jess Yeah. 00:20:29.41 Jess yeah 00:20:30.88 Michael A knight, like a one shot. 00:20:31.98 Mark McCracken Supposed to. 00:20:32.14 Jess Yeah, it was a one-shot. So it was like, yeah, short scenario. 00:20:35.02 Michael So it was a bunch of people, it was almost like, it was kind of like improvised comedy I guess. 00:20:39.12 Jess Yeah. 00:20:39.50 Michael It was just, they were just, there was a stage and there was four of them, a dungeon master and three people. 00:20:44.28 Jess Four players and I was already... 00:20:46.14 Michael And they were just, the dungeon master was like leaving them and it was funny and everyone was having a good time, I was thinking, 00:20:49.72 Jess Yeah, 00:20:53.30 Michael Is there a way to just watch that stuff? Because I thought i was happy just doing that. 00:20:57.50 Jess it seems a bit on YouTube if you wanna... 00:20:59.37 Michael Yeah. like i and I feel like you had to be, I don't know, probably like naturally quite funny. I mean, they were in front of loads of people, so it was a good job they were funny. 00:21:10.12 Michael But I don't know how I feel. I'm nervous coming to this. like i've got and I've had a beer, and now I'm halfway through a 8.4% beer. So I don't know if I could just 00:21:19.01 Jess ah 00:21:21.39 Michael get in front of a bunch of people and be like, yeah, like I'm a six-eyed something or... 00:21:27.27 Jess Well, it helps if you're already friends with them. Then, you know, then it's like, okay, I'm just kind of hanging out with my mates and we're, you know, shooting shit. 00:21:29.82 Michael Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, true. 00:21:34.57 Mark McCracken That is a pretty dark looking beer to be fair. 00:21:38.32 Jess But it is weird at first, like, cause you're like, oh, it's just like kind of role play. 00:21:39.45 Michael I'm in room. 00:21:40.36 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:21:41.55 Jess Hmm. How do I do that? 00:21:42.11 Michael Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:21:43.97 Jess But you get into it, you know? 00:21:45.51 Michael Must be weird. Is there a special name for someone's first time or? They just don't remember. 00:21:49.35 Jess What's this kind of world? 00:21:51.12 Michael Okay. D&D version, I guess, but yeah. 00:21:53.00 Mark McCracken you know that ah that are Yeah, don't get that much. ah Michael, did you have any questions tucked up your sleeve for Jess that you you kept aside? 00:21:59.71 Michael I did. I've got my notebook. 00:22:01.10 Mark McCracken did you you wrote yeah And you wrote them down in a trusty notebook. Go on ahead. 00:22:04.82 Jess but 00:22:06.40 Michael Being Australian, how do you feel about this social media van stuff and do you use social media? 00:22:12.21 Jess um is this for like i' actually 00:22:14.24 Michael It's not this, I read this, there's not actually much, there's no details yet and it's been debated, but 00:22:15.18 Jess um um 00:22:20.90 Michael They want to ban social media for under 16s. 00:22:23.94 Jess Because you're already supposed to be 13 to have an account on most of these sites, like, based on the terms and conditions. 00:22:27.19 Michael Okay. 00:22:30.61 Jess not Obviously, people don't follow that shit, but like, it's it's so... 00:22:30.89 Michael Yeah. Yeah. 00:22:35.16 Jess I don't know. I don't think social media is great for kids. 00:22:38.63 Michael Okay. 00:22:39.37 Jess If I had kids, I wouldn't want them to be on social media. I'm not on social media, um with the exception of Reddit, which is like always on the verge of just getting uninstalled. oh But yeah, I don't know. 00:22:48.37 Michael okay 00:22:51.53 Jess Um, haven't really followed it but it feels like people seem to be upset about like the way they're talking about implementing it and like having to provide ID and stuff like that which I mean how the hell do you verify someone's age otherwise but um yeah I don't know I would probably be okay with my kids not being on social media until they're at least 16 personally um but is there a privacy issue with with the data and stuff I don't know probably 00:23:00.45 Michael Okay. 00:23:16.88 Michael Yeah. 00:23:22.84 Mark McCracken Are these hypothetical kids, by the way? You don't actually have children, do you? 00:23:25.33 Jess I don't actually have children now. Do cats count? 00:23:29.22 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:23:30.45 Jess Some of them. 00:23:32.67 Mark McCracken How would you feel about it, Michael? Do your kids have social? How old are your kids? 00:23:37.33 Michael uh ones nearly nine and ones five and um i i think about i think about how much time i waste i mean and that's not even the worst part all right like i i don't i don't go on social media and go oh they're they're thin and they're beautiful and they're like i'm i'm like you i'm looking at reddit and boring stuff like that but yeah it does it does i do feel like two daughters being on there and that so we've we've had time on different 00:23:41.34 Mark McCracken and they don't They don't have it yet. To the best of your knowledge. 00:23:59.73 Mark McCracken yeah me 00:24:02.74 Jess I think it's harmful, yeah. 00:24:07.02 Michael I'm on different WhatsApp groups for parents of the school. And there's been a big thing going around about like a smartphone pledge where everyone's saying, I won't get my kid a smartphone until year nine, which is, I need to work this out. 00:24:19.38 Jess Oh, okay. 00:24:22.02 Mark McCracken Yeah, 00:24:23.36 Michael I can't do the maths, but older. 00:24:25.21 Mark McCracken Probably about 14, 15, yeah. 00:24:25.60 Michael so So everyone, so all the parents are saying, I won't get my kid a smartphone until year nine. 00:24:30.12 Jess Yeah. 00:24:30.32 Michael Yeah. And then they're all gonna like, 00:24:31.28 Jess What? 00:24:33.39 Michael because everyone's doing it, then none of the kids will get a smartphone. So, you know, you don't feel like the odd one out to one. 00:24:37.06 Mark McCracken Until one little prick gets an iPhone and then everybody gets jealous. 00:24:37.99 Jess yeah 00:24:39.16 Michael hundred Yeah, they they'll get dumb they'll get dumb phones. 00:24:40.40 Jess Okay. 00:24:41.39 Mark McCracken That's exactly what happened. Yeah. 00:24:43.87 Michael And i I've kind of thought, you know what, I kind of, I wonder if I had a dumb phone about how much time, how much less time I'd spend on the phone. 00:24:46.92 Mark McCracken Wouldn't mind. 00:24:52.88 Mark McCracken like Like a Nokia 3310 sort of thing. 00:24:53.83 Jess hey 00:24:55.88 Michael Yeah. 00:24:56.70 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:24:57.70 Michael And how much other stuff I do. And yeah, like I could, sometimes I think our kids look at us and probably go, why are they on, Why are they on screens the whole time? Sometimes I'm conscious like, shit, like I'm, you know, I'm just scrolling and it's really, it's really. 00:25:04.82 Mark McCracken yeah 00:25:07.35 Jess basically spend the whole day on the screen. 00:25:10.05 Mark McCracken I'm on the phone because I don't want to look at you that much. 00:25:12.83 Jess I need some droopamine. 00:25:13.38 Mark McCracken You're too annoying. 00:25:16.64 Michael I mean, and you start looking around like, a yeah, I got the, uh, so I get, I got this training today. Everyone's on the train looking against jury service. There's a lot of waiting around. Everyone's on the, everyone's on the scrolling and it's just like, there's a zombie. 00:25:27.84 Jess You get to have your friend during jersey. 00:25:29.39 Michael No, no, no. 00:25:30.13 Mark McCracken You can't have your phone in the court be like, oh man, this isn't just like watching TV, this is boring. 00:25:30.11 Michael So there's a lot. No, no, no, no. No, no, there's a lot of waiting while before they call you. So there's a lot of delays where you don't get told what's happening. 00:25:37.33 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:25:39.68 Michael You sit in a room and the info board. 00:25:40.95 Mark McCracken Feel terribly bored. 00:25:43.80 Michael I've got stuff I should be doing. Like ah I've got a book that I should be reading, but yeah, I'm on Reddit. 00:25:51.75 Michael I've gone down on those roads Reddit rabbit holes. I'm like, oh, no, I'm stuck in this thing. 00:25:55.29 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:25:57.92 Michael But yeah, so I'd be happy with it, I think. 00:25:57.98 Mark McCracken yeah 00:26:00.93 Michael say 00:26:01.16 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:26:03.79 Jess I just feel like it's hard though because the whole world, like they know it exists. 00:26:04.09 Michael but Yeah. 00:26:08.07 Jess The whole world is out there on it. so it's like yeah It's almost unavoidable. They're going to find some way to like make an account or to look at this stuff. and i just like I don't think it's good for kids. 00:26:18.51 Jess like You're just being constantly blasted with like, here's the best case scenario. 00:26:19.70 Michael Yeah. 00:26:23.24 Jess Here's how beautiful you could be. Here's all the wonderful things you could have in life. It's not realistic, you know? 00:26:27.02 Michael Yeah. 00:26:28.90 Jess So even if you've got a really well-balanced kid, I think it like, it seeps in there into the unconscious somehow. 00:26:29.63 Michael Yeah. 00:26:36.18 Michael my My mate my ma got, his his to his girls are a little bit older than mine, so I'm kind of getting the, what's coming. He had a session with the police recently and they were talking about the way that people get kids to like black male kids for sexual imagery. 00:26:50.98 Michael And I was like, fuck, it's really dark. It's really, it's just like, oh God, just, yeah. 00:26:55.23 Mark McCracken Can we just ah stop growing up and I'll just don't want to get to that face somehow. 00:26:59.74 Michael Yeah. That's when my firewalls and networking stuff might come in useful. finally ah Finally, I can justify buying a grand firewall for the house or something. 00:27:08.13 Mark McCracken Fancy router. 00:27:11.27 Mark McCracken there ah the only other yeah any Any other bits you've you've kept aside? 00:27:14.52 Michael I think you kind of answered one. 00:27:16.06 Mark McCracken Go on. 00:27:16.22 Michael I think I was going to say the... Did you say you're a techie, but would you say a geek or... 00:27:21.96 Jess yeah 00:27:22.13 Michael You're not a geek, you're a geek. 00:27:23.21 Mark McCracken She just admitted to going to Dungeons and Dragons. I think we got that one well ticked off. 00:27:25.43 Michael Ah, it's a different kind of geek. When did you... was so was and I know you mentioned that Java thing, but was there a moment when you thought, shit, I'm a geek. 00:27:35.57 Michael Did you have like a, oh right, that's, I'm a geek, that's like. 00:27:38.35 Jess I think that's always like, i I remember watching Star Trek as a kid and stuff. 00:27:43.62 Michael Yeah. 00:27:44.13 Jess So like, I feel like it's just always been there, the latent geekery has always existed. 00:27:49.86 Mark McCracken I think I had a pretty clear moment. 00:27:49.81 Jess oh 00:27:52.56 Mark McCracken I was trying to do some store procedures using DB2 and I had to read the IBM documentation, which is like, it's really rigid. Like if you're if you're IBM and you want to do documentation, like it sticks to this format and they've got basically ASCII art for what's like a allowable in syntax. 00:28:09.51 Jess I love that stuff. 00:28:10.70 Mark McCracken it's so It's so weird. 00:28:10.71 Michael Okay. 00:28:12.37 Mark McCracken And at one point I was reading the three of this documentation and I think it finally clicked how it all works and I was like, That's pretty geeky, that's pretty nerdy. Now that I get this, I don't think anybody else, any other normal person would just come along and just get this, because it looks awful. 00:28:25.56 Mark McCracken I was like, that's how you make a sort of procedure. I'm going to go and make five of those. 00:28:28.11 Jess You can do it everywhere now. 00:28:31.95 Mark McCracken Yeah, and I ended up making like... 00:28:32.44 Jess good and I was like, oh my god, who did this? 00:28:35.91 Mark McCracken No, I actually, I did some very nice, neat, innovative stuff that I was very proud of, but maybe maybe we'll get to it another day with the DV2. Anyway, um any other... 00:28:46.66 Jess I definitely have moments where I am reminded of how geeky I am. um yeah like I remember very excitedly explaining like Kubernetes and how it works. 00:28:51.37 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:28:51.57 Michael is it Is it around other people and you like, but yeah. 00:28:58.94 Jess I was like, oh yeah, that's cool. I was like, I'm like, buzzing with excitement. i was like ah 00:29:07.02 Mark McCracken One of us. 00:29:08.55 Michael Yeah, I don't know. I've probably told you this before. I remember a moment where you were pairing with me and he did this rejection. I was like, yeah. 00:29:16.07 Jess but bridge report but No. 00:29:19.58 Michael One of us. 00:29:20.37 Mark McCracken Yeah, it's really good. The way I find it, like, regex are really interesting. I mean, I was like, I will never get the hold of this. But the way I force myself to get into it was every time I was using my editor and I would find and replace something, I would force myself to use a regex when I do the find and replace. 00:29:36.98 Michael Yeah. 00:29:37.13 Mark McCracken And I was like, I am working at this, doing like the most basic basic. I got a dollar at the front of that. That means I just got the first bit. 00:29:43.63 Michael Yeah. 00:29:43.79 Mark McCracken ah 00:29:43.95 Michael yeah i'm I'm, I'm, I'm working with someone doesn't, doesn't do a lot of this stuff and I'm pairing them on vine and doing things and they're like, how do I do this? I want to know like, so I can see their enthusiasm. 00:29:55.78 Michael It's quite cool. So it makes me feel like, yeah, it takes awesome. 00:29:56.63 Mark McCracken Yeah, you gotta go to the the trial of fire of Regex. 00:30:02.73 Michael Yeah. 00:30:04.93 Jess Well, can you write a tar statement without checking the the manual? 00:30:05.16 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:30:09.31 Mark McCracken No, like ah like a tarball command to like zip up. 00:30:10.68 Jess but yeah 00:30:13.27 Mark McCracken a No, not a chance. No, no way. 00:30:16.04 Michael say yeah and is i There's a command line app called TLDR. 00:30:23.42 Jess Oh, yeah. 00:30:23.91 Michael So you can install it through brew and and you just do TLDR tar and it gives you like a really, really narrowed version of the man pages. 00:30:32.36 Mark McCracken of stuff that you need. 00:30:33.39 Michael So it would just give you the most common things. 00:30:34.55 Jess like 00:30:35.69 Michael She'll tilt the arm tall and it'll go four lines. This is what you do. And this, that's my, my, my top tip for the day. 00:30:41.57 Mark McCracken That sounds quite good, I might give, there we go, I'll take that top tip. 00:30:43.13 Michael So yeah. Okay. I'm here all night. 00:30:47.75 Mark McCracken Yeah, Michael, did you have any other questions up your sleeve? 00:30:50.92 Michael like I kind of, um, I dunno when, when are we going to go into the imposter syndrome stuff? 00:30:55.11 Mark McCracken Yeah, go on then. Let's go for it. ah So we got we got some we got some big topics for the week. And ah I like to keep our list hidden so that you know you can come up with something interesting, Jess. And you've chosen, which I was quite shocked by, imposter syndrome. Why on earth did you choose imposter syndrome? 00:31:13.89 Jess I've got massive impostor syndrome, man. I feel like everyone does, don't they? 00:31:16.12 Mark McCracken Really? That surprised me quite a lot. 00:31:19.94 Jess That's my revelation, is that like, every time you feel like you're just so shit at something, you're like, yeah, everybody else is also sitting there going, I'm so shit at this other thing and I hope no one notices. 00:31:21.39 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:31:30.67 Jess it well 00:31:33.81 Michael do you Do you think it's because, um, but I was, I was thinking about this cause you, you'd like, I think you mentioned it made me think about it. I was like, do you think it's because like tech is massive? 00:31:44.70 Michael Like there's so many different things or is it because the people who get into tech might generally be less, but we're not known for being the most extroverted people or is it the both things or whichever. 00:31:57.34 Jess I think, I think there is something to that in that maybe where people who, I don't know, I think a lot of people, they do this, hold yourself to like a high, too high a standard. 00:32:09.80 Jess And I think it's really easy to do in a tech world where, you know, it is like, there's so much to learn and there's new stuff all of the time. 00:32:10.05 Michael Yeah. 00:32:18.06 Jess And there's always this pressure to like, feel like you are on top of it and you know stuff and you're doing side projects and you know, again, you're going to, meetups and you're doing this and that and everything else you know to try and stay and there's no chance of staying on top of all of this stuff right like it's just it's too huge it's too so like i used to worry about that a lot like oh my god like i know this and this really well but i've like i have no idea how to do this thing 00:32:26.56 Michael Conferences and me up here. 00:32:35.92 Michael Yeah. 00:32:43.42 Mark McCracken someone's going to come along and find me out that was yeah 00:32:47.12 Michael But you don't know. You don't know. You said you used to worry about it. 00:32:49.96 Jess Um, I mean, I still do in some, I've gotten better at it because i I kind of realized after talking to a lot of people and like people way higher up than me who were like, Oh yeah, I've got imposter syndrome and you know, I worry about this now. 00:33:06.42 Jess I worry about that. You're like five levels above me. 00:33:08.85 Mark McCracken nothing 00:33:09.53 Jess Like, so it never goes away. Like, Oh no. Um, but I think I just had this, this revelation at some point that like. Yeah, everyone, most people, I'm sure, there's there's some psychopaths out there who don't have an imposter syndrome. 00:33:25.68 Jess But like I think everyone experiences this at some point, um and maybe all the time. 00:33:30.23 Michael Mark, Mark, Mark, I feel like you're one of the psychopaths, it doesn't have it. 00:33:31.16 Mark McCracken yeah Yeah. 00:33:31.77 Jess but 00:33:34.16 Mark McCracken Yeah. I think I might, um um I might be. I mean, I've always, so I was really surprised that you said it because I always, I think the first time I spoke to you, you were like the cool girl in the corner. 00:33:37.22 Jess how iney 00:33:45.10 Mark McCracken That was the architect that knew all of the stuff. And I had to come and extract some kind of information for you. And I was like, Oh shit, that's Jess. She knows all the stuff. Fuck. Better look smart. 00:33:54.39 Jess It's funny, because that's how I think about the architects before. 00:33:55.21 Mark McCracken um i yeah So I was coming to one of the holy grail architects that knows all of this stuff. 00:33:57.13 Jess I was like, I'm terrified. 00:34:02.76 Mark McCracken I was like, can you help me use an API? I was like, oh, yeah, you just do this. I was like, oh, she helped me. Thank goodness. 00:34:09.67 Jess Hmm. 00:34:09.82 Mark McCracken But I don't know. My first jobs flourished in an environment where there wasn't really any super senior people were doing what I was doing because I started off in a database team writing some SQL scripts and then in my team they mostly wrote scripts and I tried to sort of trying to do like store procedures and there wasn't really somebody in my team that knew how to do that then I moved to another team and it was like data visualization built in graphs and stuff in Tableau and then after six months I started 00:34:37.26 Jess All that dashboard stuff. 00:34:38.72 Mark McCracken Yeah, I did do some dashboard stuff. 00:34:39.62 Jess Yeah. 00:34:40.24 Mark McCracken And then i um I started working on this project to say, hey, can you do some new exploratory stuff in GCP? Can you make us a sudden new application? 00:34:46.37 Jess yeah 00:34:49.03 Mark McCracken And Nick just said, kid can you do this? And I just boldfaced lied and said, yeah, I can do that. 00:34:53.88 Jess Yeah. 00:34:55.29 Mark McCracken I just i just but i just said, this is my this is my chance. I want to get to do something interesting. And he said, can you do it? I was like, yeah, I can do it. And I quickly went away and said, oh, shit, how do I make a server? 00:35:05.42 Jess yeah 00:35:07.30 Mark McCracken I had no idea how to write a backend server. I was like, well, I'm sure it's on Medium somewhere. Medium being the holy grail of 2016 or 17. Like, yeah, it'll definitely be in here somewhere. I was like, so after following a bunch of, but I kind of, I guess I didn't really get it much because 00:35:22.94 Mark McCracken there was nobody else that was like better around at the time because I was just working in this area where there was nobody else to say don't do that or do that or what are you doing man this code sucks even though it definitely sucked or certainly areas of it but it's still going and still working so I just kind of moved from project to project where the expectation was you're doing something a little bit new a lot and I was like well if it feels it feels but I'm sure I can work it out I'm just Because I kept looking at stuff and thinking, I'm not the first person in the world to ever do this. 00:35:50.40 Mark McCracken I'm just the first person around here. So I'm sure sure it's out there somewhere. I can probably work it out. It can't be rocket science. 00:35:56.98 Jess No. 00:35:57.49 Mark McCracken Turns out some things are rocket science. Don't try and do Samuloth. I don't know how anyone ever implemented Samuloth. That is just hard. 00:36:03.96 Michael I was wondering, as someone who's a contractor, like you you you have to go between different jobs like isn relatively often. 00:36:04.08 Mark McCracken ah 00:36:13.52 Michael So you know does that help? 00:36:14.21 Mark McCracken Yeah, that I guess I really like really heavily on my experience because at some point I thought I was doing this job and I thought I really got to get some certificates because they're useful and I ended up I mean I was I was doing a lot of exploratory stuff in GCP and I just find it useful to like do you all of their tutorials. 00:36:34.95 Mark McCracken They had these quick labs and I just loved the quick labs because it would spin you up a GCP project because getting a GCP project in an enterprise environment is like way harder than it ought to be and I said yeah and I said oh you can just spin up a project and it gives you a project for one arm you can go and play with the stuff and I just did like loads of those and then I thought well I may as well do the certificates in as I know a bunch of this stuff. 00:36:43.64 Michael Platforms known here. 00:36:54.51 Mark McCracken And then through doing the certificate, you do the actual training. And and I've done a bunch of certificates. So that made it like good to have quite a broad set of skills. So then whenever I came came to contracting, they were like, have you done this before? 00:37:05.20 Mark McCracken And I was like, oh, actually, yeah, I have used Okta before. And I've done sign in stuff. And I've touched AWS before. And I know a lot about GCP. And that seemed to be OK. And I don't really shut up in interviews. 00:37:16.26 Mark McCracken So I seem to be happy with that. 00:37:17.75 Michael Can you imagine? So would you ever have any moments though where you're like, shit, I'm going to hit rumble. 00:37:19.91 Mark McCracken Shrek and donkey. 00:37:22.99 Jess I'm not going to. 00:37:23.25 Mark McCracken like I don't know what I'm doing. 00:37:24.43 Michael Yeah. 00:37:24.83 Mark McCracken um Yeah, I guess when I first started managing an Android team, so so when I was managing an iOS team, I was like, all right, I'm not an iOS developer, but I've dabbled a bit and I find it really interesting and I know like and know a bit. 00:37:36.64 Mark McCracken like i can I could do a small pull request or I can understand SwiftUI just because I'd done a lot of tutorials, but then I was managing an Android team at the same time and I was like, 00:37:36.82 Michael i stuff 00:37:45.30 Mark McCracken I tried it for a couple of weeks and I was like, you know what guys, I'm not going to be the engineering manager that knows how to do this job. So that was kind of the first time where I was actually asking people to do stuff that I didn't know how to do myself. And I was like, yeah, but the last person that managed this team wasn't an Android developer either. so 00:38:02.58 Jess Hmm. 00:38:03.81 Mark McCracken Surely it can't be that like amazingly difficult that I'm not you know stupid. and if The iOS stuff is going to be, and after you've looked at some of the code, it's not that different really. It's different SDKs to largely achieve the same stuff. 00:38:13.28 Jess Yeah. 00:38:17.02 Mark McCracken So that was the first kind of experience of trying to like rely on other people to do a job that I didn't know how to do myself. I'm not i'm never going to dive in and say, just do it like this, because I just don't know. 00:38:27.60 Mark McCracken um So that was a really, really good job for me to have that. I really liked that. And I'm managing a project at the minute where I don't know the technology. like I know how to deploy stuff on a server, and I can debug some things when it comes to actually writing some of the software they're writing. 00:38:41.63 Mark McCracken I can't do it. I i just don't have the time to learn it because I'm doing program management. based I'm going to budget meetings. 00:38:45.89 Jess Oh, I'm sorry. 00:38:47.74 Mark McCracken is sick. 00:38:50.95 Mark McCracken yeah like So much time spent in like budget meetings. And you end up getting good at that. But I just don't have time to learn this technology. So I just kind of stumbled sideways and never really felt like someone's going to find me out that I'm absolutely terrible at this because I just had enough time in in situations where people were like, well, this might go badly. 00:38:58.79 Jess yeah 00:39:11.71 Mark McCracken And I was like, well, the expectation is that this might not work. So maybe it'll be fine if it doesn't work. 00:39:15.49 Michael I think that's kind of why when I end up being a consultant. i was like similar things it like I'm going to get thrown in front of loads of people for loads of different jobs and I'm either going to have a nervous breakdown or like survive and probably go, you know, what I've kind of, yeah, that's like, you know, i I don't know if I would have called myself an SRE engineering lead and I'm one now and seems to be going okay. 00:39:24.14 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:39:32.29 Jess Yeah, realize about you 00:39:39.45 Michael And yeah, so I'm still massively like, I don't know, like coming back to the social media stuff, I think that, I don't know, I don't like LinkedIn. 00:39:39.88 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:39:49.63 Michael Like I think I go on LinkedIn and I feel, I never feel good after coming off LinkedIn. 00:39:50.77 Jess So I'm not sure. 00:39:54.78 Michael I feel like it's, it's yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:39:55.75 Jess It's social media, but around work. I mean, that's the worst part about social media. 00:39:58.36 Mark McCracken yeah 00:39:59.68 Jess Like, what the fuck? Who invented this shit? 00:40:03.31 Michael And it's like, I think it's, everyone's obviously got a hustle, like everyone's trying to sell something like themselves or there. And, and, but then you you read it and you you read about these things that people are doing and it just, it's like, 00:40:18.92 Michael You know, I think in one way it's quite cool that I'm not looking at people going, Oh, they've got massive six pack or big muscles, but I'm looking at people going, Oh, you're like a, you know, yeah, 00:40:19.50 Mark McCracken Yeah, don't I don't 00:40:25.26 Mark McCracken What is on your Instagram, man? 00:40:26.39 Jess We yellow. 00:40:29.06 Mark McCracken um Yeah, I don't understand. 00:40:31.38 Michael yeah I'm looking at stuff in another way again. 00:40:32.76 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:40:32.82 Michael Like I either find I feel bad about myself or I feel bored of tech. 00:40:32.82 Jess so 00:40:38.86 Michael Whenever I go there and I come off there, I don't feel excited about it. I feel less excited than when I went on there. Cause I think it's everything's like pushed down your throat and I'm like, Oh, kind of. 00:40:43.80 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:40:49.50 Jess I recently did like a, went to a talk thing on, um, on personal branding. 00:40:49.63 Michael Don't like it. 00:40:57.81 Jess Um, oh was like oh ah long story was signed up for it as part of something else. 00:40:57.83 Michael you know 00:41:02.85 Jess Anyway, um, it basically, but basically it was all about like, you need to post on LinkedIn and like, you need to be, you know, every two weeks or like every week, or, you know, you got to be able to build connections and you're like, you know, build your network and blah, blah, blah. 00:41:18.36 Mark McCracken That is aggressive. 00:41:18.36 Jess i don't like 00:41:19.52 Mark McCracken Can't you just like do it in real life? 00:41:21.45 Jess Can't I just exist? 00:41:22.37 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:41:22.41 Jess like why don I don't have to do this shit, it's so fake. 00:41:24.49 Michael I think it says the people that start the podcast. 00:41:27.22 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:41:27.27 Jess you see 00:41:27.50 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:41:27.69 Michael ah I mean. 00:41:27.82 Mark McCracken So it says us. Yeah. 00:41:29.91 Jess but like I feel like I'm just gonna, maybe I'm maybe i'm completely missing a trick here, but I don't think I'll randomly, you know, land my dream job because, you know, someone thumbsed up my fucking LinkedIn comment or something, you know? oh Yeah. 00:41:45.98 Michael i've I've spent the last two weeks setting up like I've been setting up my domain name to point to medium to. 00:41:46.45 Jess not me 00:41:53.62 Michael with the email accounts, but then I can't bring myself to post something, because I'm like, who cares? 00:41:57.45 Mark McCracken Actually, post a blog. the Have you written anything? 00:42:01.87 Michael No. 00:42:02.51 Mark McCracken Say, if you so if you start writing it, there you go. 00:42:02.69 Michael ah I've got something in mind. I've got something in mind. I've got like a ah one post, which I think would be good for me, and maybe I want to share it. And I think it's, I can share with you now if you want. 00:42:14.67 Michael don be like The gist is, so I've probably banged on about this to Jess, so I apologize. 00:42:14.88 Mark McCracken Go on then, what's the gist? 00:42:20.67 Michael but and So I've recently done a half marathon at a pretty good pace for a 42 year old man. So I'm pretty happy with it. and and But I've never really managed that up school. 00:42:29.95 Mark McCracken Yeah Yeah, I was born knowing all of this stuff 00:42:35.57 Michael And it's like i always I'm always like, oh, I really need to be like, I know what you're gonna suggest. 00:42:39.15 Jess You never managed to upskill. How many certificates do you have in life? 00:42:45.91 Michael Yeah, but I yeah i sat down and I was like, why am I like, Why is, but we we had this chat in the car, didn't we, Jess? So I'm going to bore you in here. So long story short, I was like, long story short, this app made the running stuff really easy because it basically was like, do this, do this run, go this fast, go this slow, do intervals. And then I was like, oh, how can I apply that to upskilling? Cause I always get there and I sit down and I'm like, oh, I'm going to do some skilling stuff. And then I ended up doing like massive yak shaving. I sit down and go, I'm going to learn, I don't know, go. 00:43:20.69 Michael Uh, what, what, what ID, or and i'm like what ID do I need? 00:43:22.23 Mark McCracken I'm going to learn Go. I love it. 00:43:25.39 Michael Massive search down Reddit to find the ID, the best idea. 00:43:26.97 Jess I know it's late on. 00:43:27.62 Mark McCracken The best, only the best IDEA. 00:43:29.81 Michael And then you're like, okay, I need to like, install these packages. 00:43:31.95 Mark McCracken Spend 20 pounds on the best IDEA first of all. 00:43:34.74 Michael I'm going to in install these packages, but how do I automate it? What if I get another machine? How do you, how do you, and before you know it, it's been like three hours of combine. You've done nothing at all. So I was like. 00:43:44.48 Mark McCracken But at least you don't have to see the kids. 00:43:48.87 Mark McCracken yeah like Yeah, this is good me time. yeah I don't learn anything. 00:43:51.63 Michael But yeah, I was thinking, yeah, long story short, and I've done nothing, I've done none of this yet because I've ended up down another Reddit rap. 00:43:52.23 Mark McCracken but 00:43:53.73 Jess like 00:43:58.68 Michael like 00:43:59.89 Jess but You figured out how to hack your brain, like whatever the that app is doing for you. 00:44:00.16 Michael some 00:44:03.81 Michael If I could, if I could do that, yeah. 00:44:04.05 Mark McCracken So it worked it worked for your for your for your for your running. 00:44:05.68 Jess Yeah. 00:44:07.18 Mark McCracken I mean, the last time I ran, I think I ran for a bus and I dropped a curly wordy and I said, never again, never, never again. 00:44:07.78 Jess yeah 00:44:14.10 Mark McCracken So maybe, you know, I would have to do, I mean, i've got I've got it just, and you can't quite see it because it's out of shot, but there is a gym right here and it's yet to be used, but it will be used. 00:44:23.06 Michael I've I've made these excuses like as soon as I as soon as I get my desk Since I guess my desk I'll be Seems 00:44:23.31 Mark McCracken ah i've been I've been unwell, I've been but on death door. 00:44:30.69 Mark McCracken As soon as you get the test. No, I can tell you, i mean I've got the desk. As soon as I got the desk, nothing happened with the gym. It didn't happen. So, yeah. 00:44:37.98 Michael I get the desk I'm gonna be up at 5 a.m. Coding go I'm not getting distracted by 00:44:42.46 Mark McCracken So, I mean, what's your what's your app like? Do you like, it just says, make sure you find the time at this time to do a run. 00:44:48.82 Michael no, it's a 00:44:50.22 Mark McCracken How did you invent the time to go for runs? All these runs run, man. 00:44:55.13 Michael You just do do it in the, so so you get, a you go, right, I'm going to do, my my goal is this. I'm going to do this half marathon at this speed. And then you get to pick between three coaches. 00:45:06.53 Michael I think I got coach Greg. 00:45:08.39 Mark McCracken And it tells you how much time you got to spend each week. 00:45:10.92 Michael Yeah. It literally says like, you can do fruit four ones this week and one of them is going to be this one. I'm just going to be this one then is going to be this. And you can move them. You can go, right. You can do Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. 00:45:23.40 Michael but you can move them and it'll even, like, you know, if you move a big run, it might move the run that's the day next to it. So all of the thinking has been taken out of it. You don't have to like, you don't have to think about it. 00:45:33.25 Michael I was like, what if you could apply that to, what if you could apply the same thing to skimming up on whatever it was? 00:45:39.17 Mark McCracken problem is michael when you sit down at your computer but it okay he's an imposter 00:45:39.48 Michael And someone just said to you, today you're gonna do Kafka, tomorrow you're gonna do version control, the next day you're gonna do go, you know, how easy it would be, like would it, I think. 00:45:50.57 Jess You know the stuff already, come on. 00:45:52.51 Michael No, I don't know Kafka. Well, I don't know Go. 00:45:55.93 Jess don't You need to learn it, you'll learn it, it's easy. 00:45:56.02 Michael No, I don't. 00:45:59.31 Michael Yeah, but I don't know. 00:46:03.60 Michael I think when I got made redundant, I kind of felt like, I think because I went and looked on job adverts and it feels like everyone's looking for everything. 00:46:11.83 Jess Yeah. 00:46:12.11 Michael And like, I mean, you're nodding, right? 00:46:13.76 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:46:14.00 Michael So it's like, you you look on stuff and you're like, we want all this stuff and we'll pay you this. 00:46:14.49 Mark McCracken Oh yeah, everyone wants everything. 00:46:19.79 Michael And you're like, fucking hell. 00:46:21.55 Jess Yeah, but they want all that stuff. 00:46:21.80 Michael That's. 00:46:22.79 Jess They're not getting all of that stuff from whoever they are. 00:46:24.63 Michael Yeah. 00:46:25.53 Jess Like, who's this magical unicorn running around that knows all these things? 00:46:25.80 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:46:28.61 Mark McCracken Yeah, you can't know all of the things. 00:46:28.75 Michael But it's still like, you know, it's like, you know, like it's happened once. People can get made redundant at any time and you want to kind of be in the best place. 00:46:34.25 Jess Yeah. 00:46:36.09 Michael And then part, you know, it's part of me, it's like, Oh, I don't want to do a blog. I don't want to do certificates. But then there's another part that's like, well, what happens if it's too late? What happens if it's suddenly like, I'm really sorry, whatever's happened, you don't have a job. 00:46:48.02 Michael And it's like, okay, shit. Now I wish that I'd done the. No, I wish I'd done, you know, AWS solutions architect or go. 00:46:52.20 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:46:56.69 Jess yeah 00:46:57.27 Michael yeah it's Yeah, I know. It's like that kind of balance of stuff. 00:47:00.87 Mark McCracken But then is is Go the thing that's going to be able to say, all right, well, can you just go? Are you going to get like a Go certificate? Michael Go's. 00:47:09.38 Michael I'm not sure how I feel about certificates now. I kind of, I don't know i doubt how you guys feel about. 00:47:11.59 Mark McCracken Yeah. So I've always seen the value in certificates in the doing rather than the having. 00:47:16.94 Jess Yeah. 00:47:18.17 Mark McCracken So the the value for me is in going through all of the learning stuff and doing all of the quick labs or whatever the AWS equivalent is and just getting your hands on and getting hands dirty and say, oh yeah, I've done something like this before. 00:47:18.76 Jess The learning. 00:47:21.70 Michael Mmm. 00:47:30.23 Mark McCracken And it's it builds up a memory that you forget. But then next time you go to see that thing, you're like, oh yeah, I remember doing this once upon a time. Where did I do this? And if you can remember where you did it, then it's like, I've done this before sort of thing. So you feel a bit more familiar and comfortable the next time you actually need to use some of that technology. 00:47:43.78 Mark McCracken And it makes it really easy to like get back up to date. So the next time somebody says, oh, I've used Dataflow, we're like, oh yeah, I've used Dataflow. Let me tell you what's changed since the last time we used it like four years ago. And it's like, oh, it's gotten better. 00:47:54.50 Mark McCracken um So i think I think the certificates are really good. And if you've done all of the work of the training, it's like ah like a treat at the end to get to go and set let's set a little exam like you're doing your, 00:47:57.38 Michael Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. 00:48:03.22 Jess It's great. 00:48:03.37 Mark McCracken Your theory tests all over again. Yeah, a little treat. 00:48:06.18 Michael Did you ask, I was going to ask Jess a question. I see. Cause you like at one point you weren't sure if you'd keep your job right. So how did you, did you feel worried about getting another one or like if, did you, did you picture the worst or? 00:48:19.73 Jess Oh, to I mean, that's just in my nature to do that. I um was somewhat fortunate slash unfortunate that I had other shit going on in my life that was like way more serious that completely took my focus. 00:48:31.44 Michael for 00:48:33.75 Jess So at that point, I was just kind of like fucking whatever, man. i got I got real problems. So if I lose my job, I lose my job. If I keep my job, fine. um Which was kind of a blessing in the end. 00:48:45.02 Jess I didn't like over focus on it and get too anxious about it. 00:48:47.23 Mark McCracken yeah Yeah. 00:48:47.78 Jess But yeah, I mean, I do. still like point taken it can happen anytime right and yeah I don't know I just feel like I'd be able to find something yeah yeah it might take a while but um hey I good de should get a decent redundancy payout like this girl ah yeah let's 00:48:56.56 Michael You'd be okay. 00:48:57.67 Mark McCracken yeah 00:48:57.76 Michael Feel like you'd be okay. 00:48:58.27 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:49:06.27 Michael and 00:49:08.02 Mark McCracken If it ever happens, yeah. um Do we want to go through some more or should we get to the news? 00:49:13.95 Jess get to the news 00:49:14.91 Michael I feel like it's okay, my homework. 00:49:14.97 Mark McCracken Let's get to the news. So I've seen a few interesting things. Michael, have you contributed any? It's just me like sticking links into the void. 00:49:22.50 Jess but 00:49:24.04 Mark McCracken ah yeah like We've had this chat now for like a month and I'm like, oh yeah, here's the place where we put all the links, Michael, to the interesting news that you've seen. And he's like, ah yeah, okay, fine, great. And I feel like I've just been posting links into the ether now. 00:49:35.72 Michael Oh no, I don't think mine's saved. 00:49:39.08 Mark McCracken You didn't see it in the shared Word document. 00:49:41.71 Michael I haven't, i've I've been out of tech, sorry. 00:49:44.06 Mark McCracken Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. 00:49:45.00 Michael That's my excuse. 00:49:45.38 Mark McCracken You even busy running. Okay. Fine. 00:49:50.25 Mark McCracken um Yeah. 00:49:50.31 Michael I've been busy, I've been busy doing my civic duty, I think. 00:49:53.06 Mark McCracken Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. 00:49:53.90 Michael Okay, no, I i have read the ones you sent me, I promise. 00:49:54.56 Mark McCracken ah So. 00:49:57.09 Mark McCracken OK, fine. So Microsoft Excel bloopers reel. There's been 40 years of spreadsheet errors. So Microsoft Excel is now 40 years old, which I find to be rather interesting. And there's been obviously lots of mistakes and incidents that have done along the way. 00:50:10.35 Mark McCracken But in 2010, too respected. So this is all directly from the Guardian. you know like Got to give credit where credit is due. But not every link is from the Guardian. 00:50:18.64 Jess It's just, ah, 00:50:20.19 Mark McCracken Too respected economists released a paper that made an influential case for the years of austerity that followed in 2010. And they argument that ah once a government's debt reaches 90% of GDP, measure of a country's economic output, growth goes into reverse. 00:50:33.08 Mark McCracken But in 2013, it emerged that they'd made an error in an Excel spreadsheet. And instead of instead of falling by 0.1%, their work should have found that the economies in question grow by 2.2%. 00:50:38.74 Jess Whoopsie. 00:50:43.58 Jess It was a pretty big era. 00:50:46.03 Michael should 00:50:47.57 Jess Like, that's a pretty big job. 00:50:48.02 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:50:48.73 Michael ah No one's like, i I've done some. 00:50:49.36 Mark McCracken which is like This is like the basis for austerity. So that was pretty egregious. 00:50:54.30 Michael I think whenever I do anything in Excel, I'm always like, I'm literally giving it to at least two other people and saying, could you please check this stuff? 00:51:00.48 Jess ah 00:51:01.51 Mark McCracken yeah 00:51:02.07 Michael and and like and And I don't think anything I do have has nationwide implications. I'm still like, please look at this. 00:51:10.25 Jess It's got co-pilot now, which I am desperate to try out when, no, I haven't done a- I love spreadsheets. 00:51:12.59 Michael Have you used it or? 00:51:16.40 Jess This is another thing I'm thinking about. Spreadsheets, love them. 00:51:18.81 Michael yeah 00:51:18.98 Jess I haven't had to do a good old spreadsheet for a while, so I'm like, I can't wait to make it out. 00:51:21.47 Mark McCracken Yeah, I think, so we've we've we've been doing this budget stuff recently. 00:51:22.35 Michael Yeah. 00:51:25.16 Mark McCracken And I think I'm the only person that's actually, for whatever reason, actually done formal training with Excel. I've done a course from Macquarie University. 00:51:33.08 Jess Ooh. 00:51:33.22 Mark McCracken ah And it teaches you a bunch of stuff about Excel. And I was like, oh, wow, great. I didn't know this function existed. 00:51:38.29 Michael is it as it Has it changed much in 00:51:41.30 Mark McCracken No, but there they can do like tons of it can do tons and tons and tons of stuff that you probably didn't know existed. So you can have like multiple sheets that are always exactly the same. and You can aggregate. Anyway, it's it's as boring as it sounds. 00:51:51.32 Michael I've know you your preachers they converted on Excel. 00:51:52.43 Mark McCracken Anyway, I'm reasonably good at spreadsheets, so I've been doing a lot of budget stuff lately. 00:51:53.95 Michael um so 00:51:57.61 Mark McCracken But i've I've not seen anybody yet try to put a chat GPT into their budget spreadsheet. That'd be quite interesting. um Computer. 00:52:03.91 Michael is is clippy Is Clippy still around or is Clippy like dead or Clippy dead? 00:52:07.17 Jess clippy day. 00:52:07.41 Mark McCracken i He's dead. 00:52:09.66 Michael and 00:52:09.77 Mark McCracken In 2010 MI5 UK's domestic spy agency tapped 134 incorrect telephone numbers because in a spreadsheet they had an error that altered the last three digits to be 000. 00:52:24.91 Jess And no one noticed that my old online browser 00:52:25.95 Mark McCracken So they just truncated the end of the phone numbers. They truncated the end of the phone numbers and said a formatting fault on an electronic spreadsheet and said that a degree of unintended collateral intrusion occurred. 00:52:38.55 Michael I, I used to, so I was, um, when I was at uni, phones started becoming a thing. Like literally, I mean, that's how old I am. 00:52:47.88 Jess ah in mobile phones 00:52:48.01 Michael As in like mobile phones. 00:52:50.81 Jess but fuck 00:52:52.00 Michael And my, I, I remember I had a friend that was on the same course as me and her mobile phone number was like the same as mine, but two digits were switched around and we'd sometimes get messages meant for each other. 00:53:05.86 Mark McCracken Weird. 00:53:05.95 Michael like genuine and it was just you were like, oh my God, how can this stuff happen? 00:53:09.86 Mark McCracken I did once meet a guy in the base shop and the last six digits of his phone number were the same as mine. And I was like, that's a bit freaky. It's like a 1 million chance. um ah Yeah, there were there were other large mistakes. 00:53:17.96 Michael eco 00:53:23.43 Mark McCracken During COVID, nearly 16,000 cases went unreported in Excel because the maximum size of a file could only be so big. And the file got truncated, which is obviously not very good. 00:53:36.18 Michael This happened at work to us, Jess. 00:53:38.66 Jess Yeah, I remember what it was though. 00:53:38.92 Mark McCracken Did it? 00:53:41.13 Michael They set, there was a database table where they realized they'd set the primary column to be, because you've got big in, don't you? 00:53:52.41 Jess Yeah, integer overflow problems. 00:53:52.98 Michael It's your big in, and you've got longs, and you've got, yeah. 00:53:57.56 Jess Yeah. 00:53:58.02 Michael They basically worked out they'd used the wrong column for like the member table. It's probably you, Mark. 00:54:03.90 Michael They'll blame you for it. 00:54:04.70 Mark McCracken Probably doing something stupid, yeah. 00:54:05.75 Michael yeah 00:54:07.61 Mark McCracken um So, other news. 00:54:09.37 Michael If anyone else joins up it's going to break. 00:54:13.65 Mark McCracken ah Google has racked up two undecillion rebels worth of fines from Russia. 00:54:17.46 Jess like Before you move on from Excel, I loved the ah conclusion of that article, which was the major problem with Excel is it's too accessible. 00:54:20.02 Mark McCracken Oh, go on then. 00:54:28.40 Jess It's too easy for people to make shit that kind of works and do it like really badly. 00:54:33.47 Mark McCracken The problem is anyone can create Excel sheets badly. 00:54:36.78 Michael Has anyone and as we're here, has anyone used, have have any of you done stuff with low code? 00:54:38.06 Jess And it's terrifying what the world runs on Excel spreadsheets where people copy paste shit all over the place. 00:54:41.52 Mark McCracken Oh, yeah. Very much so. 00:54:47.67 Jess Oh, back in the day. 00:54:48.19 Mark McCracken I touched it in places here and there. 00:54:49.57 Jess Yes. 00:54:52.41 Mark McCracken Tried to avoid it somewhat. 00:54:52.96 Michael It's interesting though, like I went to a low code workshop and they were like, you had prompts and and you were like, I think we were told to like make a vet database, make a vet app. 00:55:04.61 Jess Right. Yeah. 00:55:06.81 Michael all three prompts. 00:55:08.80 Mark McCracken They're prompt, like prompt engineering is quite recently then. 00:55:09.09 Michael And you would literally, yeah, it was literally like, it was a, I think it was, is it Power Apps, Microsoft Power Apps? 00:55:15.47 Mark McCracken Yeah. Yeah. 00:55:16.01 Jess Right. 00:55:16.41 Michael And you were like, I want i want a i on a website that manages vets and I want to store this information about certain pets, animals, and I want to store information about this and the other. 00:55:17.20 Mark McCracken I know that. 00:55:25.03 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:55:26.53 Michael And it literally like five minutes, you've got a UI, a database, it was quite, maybe it was like, 00:55:30.35 Jess I wonder if AI makes sense better. 00:55:34.01 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:55:34.97 Michael for for prototyping stuff, like pretty cool. 00:55:35.26 Mark McCracken So. I've become quite a fan of lots of lots of Microsoft things. 00:55:37.84 Jess i 00:55:40.88 Mark McCracken It's largely based on Teams and doing bits and pieces of automation with Teams, which has been really good. So that Power Apps, I would be quite keen to spend some time on it. And up until recently, I was thinking of doing this current project using Power Apps until we found out there's a better technology that we're already using somewhere else. 00:55:51.37 Michael I think they used to get, they used to get shit rep, didn't they? 00:55:56.69 Mark McCracken So that Power Apps is pretty good. 00:55:58.83 Michael But I think now like, yeah. 00:55:59.48 Mark McCracken Yeah. They've been doing it a long time and doing it consistently from what I gather. 00:56:03.76 Michael yeah 00:56:04.41 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:56:04.97 Michael And Azul is meant to be like, we've got loads of clients that using Azul over like way over GCP, right? 00:56:08.64 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:56:11.49 Mark McCracken Yeah, yeah. 00:56:11.98 Jess Hmm. 00:56:13.73 Mark McCracken Anyway, we got we got three or four more things. 00:56:14.57 Michael mean you 00:56:15.91 Mark McCracken um 00:56:18.41 Mark McCracken Google has racked up two undecillion rubles, which is 2.5. 00:56:21.61 Jess I didn't even know that was a 00:56:23.12 Mark McCracken Yeah, neither did I. 2.5 decillion worth of fines in Russia. So they were fined a daily penalty of 100,000 rubles in 2010 after they did something that annoyed Russia. um Basically they find doubles every week. And it's cut to the point where it's like more money exists than in the entire world and they're like, keep doubling it. 00:56:49.05 Jess I'm gonna hit an overflow at some point, it's gonna go back down to like, negative. 00:56:50.02 Mark McCracken And they're like, yeah, yeah. 00:56:51.14 Michael Yeah, yeah. Maybe that's Google's plan. 00:56:54.92 Jess yeah It's a spreadsheet, I guarantee it. 00:56:54.95 Michael Keep going, keep going. 00:56:55.39 Mark McCracken Maybe, maybe. um 00:56:58.63 Michael yeah 00:57:01.13 Mark McCracken The government website now has got a chatbot available. So gov.uk has got a chatbot to help with business users, but it can only do so much stuff. So that was kind of interesting. I don't know. Do you guys have to use the government websites a lot? 00:57:17.52 Jess Not really. 00:57:17.93 Michael I think it's quite good. um but I'm pretty impressed by the stuff that's like. 00:57:21.88 Mark McCracken I mean the government the mean, the UK digital government stuff is really very good to be fair. 00:57:25.38 Jess It was good, yeah. 00:57:26.32 Mark McCracken It's just very good. Like whenever you go to do your tax returns, even though they're like super complicated, every last thing is like accessible and it's got its own little help button and it's got but everything. 00:57:33.64 Jess yeah 00:57:34.97 Mark McCracken and you know I don't pay the the biggest amount of attention to accessibility stuff. That's a website that just feels like if I were blind, I'm sure I could work this out. too 00:57:44.35 Jess i Having done tax returns in two different countries, I can say it the UK website is way better, at least the Australian one was 10 years ago last time I was doing a tax return. 00:57:50.39 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:57:54.31 Jess so 00:57:54.71 Michael I think, I think this must be one of those things where like, it it must be really obvious how much money you save by digitizing that stuff. 00:58:02.85 Jess Mm. 00:58:03.27 Mark McCracken Yeah, I mean, it must be ah getting it right. 00:58:03.70 Michael I think that would be quite a cool place to work. Like thinking like, oh, like, do you know anything? 00:58:07.00 Mark McCracken Yes, it would. 00:58:08.07 Michael Like I've done this and that saved like whatever amount of money because someone's able to just. 00:58:11.73 Mark McCracken Yeah, it would it would be really good. But also, if you're a permanent employee, you're probably not that well paid. I did see not so long ago, I'm sure I seen, yeah, well, good pensions as in a good pension percentage. 00:58:18.73 Michael Big pensions. 00:58:23.55 Mark McCracken But I'm sure I seen last year that there was a job they posted for like head of cybersecurity that was £56,000. 00:58:28.59 Michael This, this, this was not LinkedIn. 00:58:30.50 Jess I was like, do you really want security? 00:58:30.97 Mark McCracken I've seen that. 00:58:32.20 Jess Like, madly do you want it? 00:58:32.49 Mark McCracken Yeah, exactly the point. Do you want your head of cybersecurity? 00:58:34.64 Michael I remember, I remember that post. I remember that post on LinkedIn. I remember some people commenting that I remember one of the comments that head of didn't mean, didn't mean the same as it means in some private companies. 00:58:40.54 Mark McCracken This is like ruinous. 00:58:48.81 Jess What mean then? 00:58:48.88 Mark McCracken What does head of mean? 00:58:51.04 Jess Like, ah you're a head of the team or something at least. 00:58:52.04 Mark McCracken Surely you're in charge of something. 00:58:54.27 Michael It went, I definitely went viral with the next time that I remember. 00:58:57.02 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:58:57.94 Michael I remember seeing that thing, so. 00:58:59.75 Mark McCracken Yeah, it was not so good. AWS had a CDK flaw that exposed accounts to full takeover, which I find on the register. 00:59:06.42 Jess Oh yeah, I read that one. 00:59:07.13 Michael I read that one, I was. 00:59:07.45 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:59:08.25 Michael a see So you got a you got a random bucket, basically, didn't you? 00:59:08.72 Jess And then there was a linked article about the other exploit as well, which was also interesting. 00:59:09.02 Mark McCracken Like, yeah, ah not good. 00:59:16.08 Michael So if you're using, has anyone used CDKs, by the way, or? 00:59:19.41 Mark McCracken a little bit, only the smallest of amount. 00:59:19.72 Michael No, a little bit. 00:59:21.42 Mark McCracken I used it a small amount, and I was like, this is not nearly as intuitive as Google Cloud SDK, because it's like got a full hierarchy, but it feels like there's much less, it's a much flatter hierarchy of instructions. 00:59:31.78 Mark McCracken You type in what it is, and then there's like a much flatter hierarchy of commands, and I'm like, I'm never gonna remember this, whereas Google Cloud was like broken into like super subsections. You'd be like, there's only like four or five things in each level, and that felt like reasonable. 00:59:41.41 Michael yeah 00:59:45.44 Michael But like generally doing like infrastructure from code instead of as code. 00:59:45.65 Mark McCracken I didn't enjoy it. 00:59:48.47 Mark McCracken Yeah. 00:59:49.11 Michael Have you done that, or? 00:59:50.05 Mark McCracken No, tell me more. 00:59:50.81 Michael OK. I haven't done it, but I can see what it's kind of like. I've got to the point where you know you you write terraform, and you write Ansible, and you write anbu when you're writing YAML. 01:00:02.32 Michael And YAML's not a, you know, there's only so far you can go with like logic in YAML. 01:00:04.10 Mark McCracken Not very programming. Yeah. 01:00:08.38 Michael So, you know, the way I understand it is when you use CDK, you're using, you know, Java or Python or TypeScript. So you actually get to code infrastructure in ah in a language that has constructs like loops and, you know, breaking out of loops and that stuff. 01:00:25.02 Jess um but Yeah. 01:00:25.52 Michael So it sounds quite interesting. and some Something we should talk about, something I mean to, Look out on the million of things is like dagger, dagger out of it. 01:00:35.69 Mark McCracken I have heard of that actually, yeah. 01:00:37.08 Michael So you can write, da I think dagger is from at least some of the people that are at Docker. So when you, when you write stuff into, so dagger is mine. Something is dagger is a bunch of dagger is a way of writing CICD pipelines, but in code. 01:00:51.75 Michael So I think you can use go Python type script and maybe Java, and you can actually program CICD. 01:00:54.56 Mark McCracken TypeScript, yeah. 01:01:00.66 Michael And, and you can, you can write libraries and things and they're, they're reusable across different providers ah or, or ah or a GitLab pipeline or a drone pipeline or a harness pipeline, or you can run it on your machine and you can, yeah, I think what my understanding, and like I haven't used it is, you know, you get to a point with things like YAML where you can't, you can't just declare logic. 01:01:05.99 Mark McCracken Ah, and does that then like compile into like a GitHub action or yeah. So if you wanted to move from one to the other, yeah. 01:01:30.52 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:01:30.76 Michael in that way. seat So it's like, well, why not? yeah i I definitely remember when like DevOps was kicking off. Everyone was really excited. And then after about six months, like Java Dev was like, fuck, I hate YAML. 01:01:40.80 Jess yeah i was like i need to school 01:01:42.43 Michael All I'm doing is writing YAML all day. like i want to write I want to write code. 01:01:45.40 Jess yeah 01:01:47.99 Michael So I'm quite interested. That's on my list anyway. 01:01:50.72 Mark McCracken This looks quite different from the last time I've seen it, and by quite different, I mean their website looks nicer and more accessible, so I might spend more time reading it this time than I did last time. 01:01:51.64 Jess and 01:01:56.75 Michael Yeah. 01:01:59.08 Michael I think, however, you know, whatever you think about Docker, like, you know, it made a massive impact. 01:02:01.80 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:02:03.16 Michael So, yeah, kind of, mm-hmm. 01:02:03.23 Mark McCracken Oh, yeah. So if those folks are involved, then yeah, maybe you could have a look. 01:02:07.05 Jess Yeah, everyone was like getting to up school. 01:02:07.72 Mark McCracken um Then the last one I've got, which maybe you folks haven't seen, is around Apple Intelligence. So they've got some adverts. um Because Apple Intelligence is only out in the US, I'm guessing these adverts are only over there. 01:02:19.85 Mark McCracken But these adverts are like really quite weird. Have you watched any of them? 01:02:22.75 Michael Is it, no, it's not because, no, I went to breakfast and my mind mate's a massive Apple fanboy. 01:02:28.77 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:02:29.45 Michael And he, I think he's got like the, and like you, he's got the iOS beta with Applin. 01:02:30.38 Mark McCracken Hi. Yeah. 01:02:35.60 Mark McCracken Yeah, but you can't do anything with it. Well, at least I can't do anything with it. 01:02:38.04 Michael I was like, oh, what can you do? And he's like, well, it can, it's, it's in your notifications. It can, um, summarize them. 01:02:45.38 Mark McCracken Summarize texts. Yeah. 01:02:48.09 Michael Let's be like, Oh, okay. 01:02:49.41 Mark McCracken So i I tried to install it and and do some stuff on on my Mac because So the reason I haven't launched it in the EU is because if they make any if they make any software that's available in the platform, they have to make the the underlying APIs available too for competition reasons. But apparently, macOS doesn't isn't big enough to be a big enough player that they have to do it on that. So you can get it on your Mac if you switch the region and language to US, which has little impact. um But getting it to do anything, 01:03:24.25 Mark McCracken It just does writing tools. It's it's just just like chat tbt, like condense this text or change this text in some way or give me the key points so you can get it to summarize stuff and it's fine, but like it doesn't appear that many times. 01:03:34.06 Michael did you Did you see that um Linus made a comment about AI? 01:03:40.85 Mark McCracken No, what did he say? 01:03:43.64 Mark McCracken You grew up a guy. 01:03:45.64 Michael I mean, he? said He said it was a like mostly a big hype cycle, and he didn't he didn't think that a lot he didn't think thatll lot of it would be around in the next few. 01:03:51.26 Mark McCracken Oh yeah. 01:03:55.14 Michael Or he hadn't seen the... think I feel like this is where I need to distance my professional self from my public self. 01:03:57.81 Mark McCracken selling point of it. Yeah. 01:04:01.23 Jess Yeah, so it was my call from... 01:04:01.71 Michael but like i 01:04:03.19 Mark McCracken So I don't know, you never, you never, you never know what's going to stick around. 01:04:03.37 Michael yeah yeah Buy AI. 01:04:06.77 Mark McCracken Like the biggest thing that I find like that, like the most enduring feature that I've used a lot is on video calls with the little emojis. So if you do like this, the little symbols thing, you get like, you get these. 01:04:14.47 Jess Oh yeah, that's cool. i yeah Oh, I didn't find this turned on. 01:04:15.26 Michael Let's try it. It worked for you. 01:04:18.39 Mark McCracken Yeah. Does it work? 01:04:20.84 Jess No, it's not. 01:04:21.70 Michael Where's mine not working? 01:04:21.81 Mark McCracken You got it. 01:04:21.84 Jess Damn. 01:04:22.23 Mark McCracken You got it. You got to leave it up for a second. And then it's like confetti. 01:04:26.40 Michael It's only yours. 01:04:26.80 Mark McCracken No, you've not turned it on. 01:04:27.76 Michael Have you got the new Apple? 01:04:28.08 Mark McCracken You guys have lasers. 01:04:29.52 Michael Yeah. 01:04:29.88 Mark McCracken So as soon as this feature come out, the little show your hands for emojis. so I started, you I use it every day, like every day in calls. Cause nobody else can do it. Cause everybody's got windows computers. So I'm just like, yeah. 01:04:40.74 Mark McCracken And then they're like, what are you doing with fireworks? 01:04:42.70 Michael Okay. 01:04:43.34 Jess but 01:04:44.30 Mark McCracken ah So I do this like four times a day and people, everyone's like kind of jealous of it. They're like, oh, that's really cool. I wish I had that. I'm like, it's not that cool, but I use it a lot. um But the Apple intelligence, anyway, their adverts are kind of weird. 01:04:56.58 Mark McCracken It's just really lazy people doing stuff and then saying, change this a bit. 01:05:01.41 Jess Yeah, I just memorize this shit, and they're like, no, I'm a genius, you know? 01:05:01.92 Mark McCracken Using Apple intelligence. 01:05:05.63 Mark McCracken Yeah, I know. It's like the strangest adverts I've seen in such a while. 01:05:06.56 Jess I'm like, right? I find the AI thing so interesting because I was like, I'm a major skeptic about it. 01:05:13.69 Mark McCracken oh Yeah, so I'm like do something really useful and like you see some professional oh on that topic I do have one. Have you heard of notebook LM? 01:05:27.29 Michael I've you've mentioned it I'm sure but or I've seen it. 01:05:28.85 Mark McCracken I mentioned it at the start of this. 01:05:29.49 Michael but 01:05:30.71 Mark McCracken So Notebook LM is actually a really interesting thing from Google and I've seen an enterprise demo of it recently. But Notebook LM, basically you give it some documents, it summarizes the documents and you can ask it questions. 01:05:42.34 Mark McCracken But the most interesting bit about this is it can generate you a podcast, a conversational style podcast between two people where they talk. 01:05:50.47 Michael Yes. 01:05:52.33 Jess Okay, but this is insane though, right? Like we're already joking that like, so I find AI great for doing dumb shit. 01:05:55.08 Mark McCracken It is insane. 01:05:59.60 Jess Like, okay, he's going to transcribe your meeting so that no one has to take minutes. And okay, summarizes what I've done at the end of the week. 01:06:03.03 Mark McCracken And that is great. I love that. Yeah. 01:06:06.11 Jess So I don't have to write my own stupid report. I just, um, so, but it's, uh, we're already at the point where we're getting AI to write our emails for us to send to other people who are getting AI to summarize it. 01:06:17.85 Jess So they don't have to do it. 01:06:18.26 Mark McCracken Yeah, make this, fluff this up a bit. Yeah, like that's one of the strangest things. I'm sure i'm sure Google did a demo at one point where they said we we can make your email look nice. And then on the other side, they showed like five and said, we can condense your emails into smaller thing. And I'm like, 01:06:19.24 Jess Like the what we 01:06:34.07 Mark McCracken Do they not realize I closed the showing these two demos and that this is all just a huge waste of time? But I did do one thing with this, which I don't know if you'll forgive me or not. um So for for whatever reason, we're not connected on LinkedIn. 01:06:45.55 Mark McCracken Maybe you're not that active, Jess. I don't know why. but i take your so So therefore, all I can see is your public LinkedIn page. 01:06:49.15 Jess I'm totally not that active. 01:06:53.56 Jess Oh. 01:06:53.75 Mark McCracken So I printed it to a PDF, and I upload it and and i uploaded it to notebook LM. 01:06:55.79 Jess Oh no. Why? 01:06:56.90 Michael It's getting freaky now. 01:06:59.86 Jess Hey, that's my personal data. 01:07:01.55 Mark McCracken It is, yeah. And I said, make a podcast of two people, but pretend one of them is Jess and pretend the woman is Jess and ask it a bunch of questions, which I thought was really bizarre. 01:07:08.74 Michael Oh god, this is going to be weird again. 01:07:12.39 Mark McCracken Would you like, which well, do you want to hear it? 01:07:12.40 Michael You've got to play it now, right? 01:07:16.33 Jess Yes? I don't know how much it can infer about me. 01:07:21.00 Mark McCracken But this is this is all from your your public LinkedIn because we're not we're not friends. 01:07:25.67 Jess Send me a request. 01:07:26.75 Mark McCracken Oh, hang on. 01:07:28.35 Jess What are you doing? 01:07:28.95 Mark McCracken That's playing on my actual headset. 01:07:32.55 Michael Could you, did you say like in an Australian accent or? 01:07:33.57 Mark McCracken Here we go. No, it's only American access. 01:07:37.31 Michael Okay. 01:07:38.33 Mark McCracken So I think after a few minutes, it starts by pretending to be just. k teing that's That's quite a journey. So where did this formal IT education begin? I studied at Charles Darwin University. 01:07:48.98 Jess Oh stop it! 01:07:49.69 Mark McCracken No way. 01:07:50.40 Jess I already did it! I did it so much! 01:07:52.85 Mark McCracken Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, well, it is a robot. 01:07:53.10 Jess It sounds like a robot! 01:07:56.92 Jess I know, but the other guy, the guy sounded not like a robot. 01:08:00.51 Mark McCracken Yeah. So it's, uh, 01:08:01.72 Jess And the woman sounded like I studied art. 01:08:04.53 Michael Yeah. 01:08:05.60 Mark McCracken Mine was even worse. I took my own CV and pasted it in. And it's a 30 minute podcast of them talking about my career. And I was like, this is so weird and awful. So I played it in the kitchen. And my girlfriend was like, what is this? Have you been featured on something? Because she had never heard notebook go down before. And I was like, no, it's all AI. And she was like, oh my God, you're such a dick. 01:08:24.39 Mark McCracken It's just like it's like, that's the most grandiose thing you can do to yourself is put your own CV and make a podcast about yourself. 01:08:24.70 Jess um 01:08:31.35 Mark McCracken But it was the first document I had to hand and I just pasted it in the CV. I was like, give this a run and see if it's any good. And it's just the weirdest thing. 01:08:38.33 Jess these 01:08:38.41 Mark McCracken But I can imagine like, no, it's the dead internet theory. 01:08:38.46 Michael Have you? 01:08:38.99 Jess um dead internet theory that the the internet is just largely like bots fucking posting shit on social media words liking and commenting it and it's like the actual real people 01:08:51.90 Mark McCracken What's the point? Yeah, there's there's nothing real left on the internet. 01:08:53.81 Jess look 01:08:54.46 Michael um good i'm I'm quite interested in the music side. live to stay have you Have you seen these things where it's like and there was there was a new there was a new Nirvana song with Kurt Cobain? 01:09:06.64 Mark McCracken ah That's a bit weird. 01:09:07.22 Jess Oh, did they wait? 01:09:07.50 Michael as in like it was like you know that theyd they'd made something and you know like I've seen stuff where it's like they could you know not too long from now they could go jest this would be your perfect song based on everything you've listened to this has got all the elements of all the things you like and you could almost say like this is the mood I'm feeling I'm feeling a bit melancholy I'm feeling you know upbeat I'm just about to go out for a night out here's a perfect song that's been made just for that moment 01:09:08.83 Jess Yeah. 01:09:09.14 Mark McCracken Yeah, yeah. 01:09:32.47 Mark McCracken I don't know if I like it. 01:09:35.59 Jess I don't know how I feel about that. 01:09:37.16 Michael Yeah. 01:09:37.75 Jess I don't like it. 01:09:37.88 Mark McCracken it and Isn't some of the novelty of that though and like the bits of the song that you don't quite love as much and then you get to your favorite bit and then the very fact that other people know the song as well? 01:09:38.98 Jess I don't know. 01:09:45.55 Michael yeah i bit fit oh bridge suck but Yeah. 01:09:49.78 Jess But like at what point is your entire online experience just a bubble that's been curated for you by an AI? 01:09:50.09 Mark McCracken I don't know. 01:09:53.37 Mark McCracken It's just you, made for you. 01:09:57.52 Jess like 01:09:57.84 Michael This is how I feel about, and so this this is how I'm starting to feel a bit about stuff I linked in, like all the stuff. I'm i'm interested in platform engineering. And now it's like, and it's just like, uh, and like, it's, it's almost making me feel the other way. 01:10:10.71 Jess ah 01:10:14.96 Michael It's almost making me feel like, you know, I want to, I don't know, learn Pearl or something, just cause it's like, just everything's just. 01:10:17.35 Mark McCracken Yeah, so do something a bit different. 01:10:17.65 Jess Yeah. We're a masochist. 01:10:22.53 Michael Yeah. 01:10:22.99 Mark McCracken So yeah, there's like definitely echo chamber vibes. Whenever you go on to LinkedIn, if I click on jobs, all I ever see is the exact same title that I've currently got. And I'm like, that's kind of weird. Maybe I don't want to do that. I like to like to shuffle it up a bit. 01:10:33.83 Michael Yeah. 01:10:34.44 Mark McCracken ah you know Variety is the spice of life, so to speak. um So I'm like, that's a bit funky. Anyway. um Yeah, last thing we got then is recommendations. What are you listening to? Music, podcasts, audiobooks? What are you watching? Any games, books, new technology tools? What do you got to recommend? 01:10:53.85 Jess um Sorry, I'm very going to a concert very soon, which I'm really looking forward to, which is sleep token, if you haven't heard them. 01:11:01.89 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:11:02.01 Michael Ah cool. 01:11:03.31 Mark McCracken I have not. 01:11:03.59 Michael Yes I have. 01:11:04.55 Jess love them um so I think that's end of November. oh Massive stadium tour. Super psyched about that. 01:11:11.39 Mark McCracken Wicked. 01:11:13.10 Jess um What else? oh god um Still playing Baldur's Gate 3. Quite possibly the best game ever made, I think. 01:11:22.17 Mark McCracken What does boulders get three? 01:11:25.41 Jess Okay, well, if you're not into D and&D, then I can maybe forgive you. It's um it's it's an incredibly expansive RPG made by an amazing game studio, ah which is based on the Dungeons & Dragons 01:11:35.55 Mark McCracken Balders get three. 01:11:44.80 Jess universe and rules and everything like that but with like an amazing story and it's fucking i'm about 250 hours in on my first place with me done ah way um i'm busy being a murder hobo and like carving up hordes of goblins and not so um yeah 01:11:46.83 Mark McCracken yeah Yeah Very nice 01:11:56.41 Michael No, no, no wonder you're not coding outside work. 01:12:11.46 Mark McCracken Wicked. I had a couple of things. I've just finished watching, well, I've just been watching The Day of the Jackal on Sky TV, which has been, it is so good. 01:12:20.80 Jess Is it good because I read the book and the book's a mate? 01:12:23.64 Mark McCracken I didn't know there was a burger. Apparently there's a movie as well that have been out a while ago. 01:12:25.43 Jess Why, yeah, I read the book about 15 years ago, it was good. 01:12:27.58 Mark McCracken So I hadn't heard of it before, but um it's Eddie Redman as as a lovely assassin. 01:12:31.21 Jess Oh, I love him. Okay. 01:12:32.98 Mark McCracken And he is, it's it's really, really good. I thought it was a season finale last night. So I was like, I don't care if I'm late for this podcast. I wanna watch this first of all about pizza and then I'm gonna, get it sort of the survivors slightly delayed. But yeah, that's been really, I thought it was a season finale tonight, but it's more than more than six episodes. So I've been chuffed for that to find out that, well, I assume there's going to be more, otherwise that was a really crappy ending to a season. Yeah, there's definitely going to be more. So that's been really good. The other thing I had was a book that was recommended at BT. How big things get done. 01:13:04.87 Mark McCracken which I find super interesting. It's about a guy that at some point in the 90s or whatever, he was managing some large infrastructure projects and then wanted to find out wanted to find some sort of database to find out more about the projects that go well and the projects that don't go well. And it didn't exist, so he made it. So he started researching on tons and tons of large infrastructure projects and across software, IT, t architecture, 01:13:29.80 Mark McCracken medicine, all kinds of stuff to find out which projects go well and which projects don't go well and why and how and he gives loads of really interesting comparisons. um One about in particular about the Empire State Building had a really good example of that at the start where he said that over the course of 10 working days they assembled 14 and a half stories which seems absolutely wild. 01:13:52.65 Jess What? 01:13:53.98 Michael Now, okay. 01:13:54.50 Mark McCracken That went like enormously well and it was like in the 1930s or whatever 01:13:55.07 Jess What? 01:13:58.41 Jess Before health and safety regulations. 01:13:59.98 Mark McCracken yeah Don't worry about that, don't worry about that. um And the other one was interesting was... 01:14:04.13 Jess 14 stories in 10 days and only 100 people died! 01:14:06.23 Mark McCracken It's not like guitar these days. um The other one was Sydney Opera House. 01:14:14.07 Jess Oh yeah. 01:14:14.22 Mark McCracken Have you been to Sydney, Jess? 01:14:15.85 Jess Yeah, yeah, many times. 01:14:16.79 Mark McCracken Yeah, lovely. 01:14:18.13 Jess It's very 01:14:18.42 Mark McCracken Well, apparently the guy that designed the Sydney in the Opera House Didn't design anything, you just drew some nice stuff and said, this this is this would be great if it looked like this and didn't really do like a subsequent amount of really good planning. 01:14:29.94 Mark McCracken So he's well known for doing this one thing, but it took way, way, way longer than it ever should have, like 20 years longer. 01:14:29.95 Jess Wow. 01:14:37.60 Mark McCracken And he never actually, he was kicked off the project and had to leave the country and never got to see the finished product ever, which sounded a bit grim. 01:14:44.68 Jess Explains why there's not many other buildings in the world that are designed similarly. 01:14:47.46 Mark McCracken yeah Yeah, um there are there are not there are not nobody else to give a job after that. But yeah, that's a really good book. How big things get done. 01:14:56.51 Jess Nice. 01:14:56.85 Mark McCracken um Michael, any big recommendations? 01:14:57.31 Jess That sounds interesting. 01:15:01.60 Michael So I've been listening to the new Cure album. It's really good. 01:15:05.80 Mark McCracken Yeah, the cure. 01:15:06.03 Michael Really, really, really good. Yeah. And I kind of feel like I feel like I've slept on the Cure and I've never listened to them now. I'm like, it's so good. So i'm I'm in a little WhatsApp group called One Movie, One Album, One Month. 01:15:19.46 Mark McCracken Okay. 01:15:19.51 Jess Oh. 01:15:19.63 Michael And it doesn't, we don't always do it. It's actually just our mates, but we kind of, We try and throw out like a film and ah and an album recommendation. It was only about three days into November and I was like, it's so good. 01:15:26.84 Jess That's cool. 01:15:27.92 Mark McCracken Songs of a... 01:15:30.53 Michael And someone else was like, yes, it's really good. So, it's songs were lost. 01:15:32.96 Jess And now you have the whole album you can listen to as well. 01:15:33.81 Mark McCracken Songs of a Lost World? Yeah. 01:15:37.06 Michael It's quite good. It's it's about, and it's most of the content is about, sound like I'm really morbid now. I'm not that old, but like, he's kind of like talking a lot about the fact that he's, 01:15:49.78 Michael towards the end of his life and, you know, like looking at respectx please saying and but it really good. Uh, I'm off to a gig on Saturday. 01:15:59.34 Mark McCracken Hey, you gonna see? 01:15:59.61 Michael I'm going to see therapy who I've seen about 18, 18, uh, how many times about 18 million. 01:16:02.59 Jess how many times but no 01:16:06.21 Michael So when, actually, you you know, when you're asking just the question about what was your first. 01:16:07.04 Mark McCracken yeah 01:16:11.50 Michael Code thing. I think like I, I coded a therapy website and is HTML code. Does that count? 01:16:16.90 Mark McCracken Yeah, that counts for sure. 01:16:18.35 Michael I think I was 01:16:20.35 Mark McCracken You can pay the bills at the HTML, yeah. 01:16:20.66 Michael 15 15 Well, yeah, so I'm gonna see them on Saturday um What else so Cal new does anyone have Cal Newport So so Cal Newport wrote a book called deep focus and deep no deep work and and it's kind of about it's about how 01:16:37.01 Mark McCracken Yes, I don't know which book he's written. 01:16:38.71 Jess um 01:16:41.85 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:16:44.40 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:16:49.24 Mark McCracken Getting in the zone. 01:16:49.34 Michael There's so many distractions going on in the modern world that what will differentiate you from other people in terms of getting ahead will be the ability to focus on work. 01:16:51.27 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:16:59.22 Michael And he's got a follow-up book, which is called Slow Productivity, which is about different techniques for being more productive and stuff like that. 01:17:10.26 Mark McCracken Is it good? 01:17:13.21 Michael Ironically, I'm sitting there, and I'm half on my book, and I'm half on my phone. and 01:17:17.80 Mark McCracken a You're terrible at reading this book. 01:17:17.78 Michael so i'm terrible I'm not focusing on tools. Someone at work has like just got a Keychron keyboard and like they've got a mechanical keyboard basically. 01:17:26.71 Mark McCracken A what? 01:17:27.28 Jess All right. 01:17:29.33 Mark McCracken Like a mechanical keyboard, yeah. 01:17:31.24 Michael and like The Reddit rabbit hole I've been talking about is me going down that rabbit hole and now and I've convinced myself that I need a mechanical keyboard. I just need to buy it just so I can get off the internet and like stop looking at so 01:17:43.61 Jess It's a very satisfying key clacking sound on those things. 01:17:46.49 Michael Brown switches, do I want brown switches, do I want red switches? 01:17:49.07 Jess Oh, you can build some rhythm, dude. 01:17:50.35 Michael Do you have one or? 01:17:51.88 Jess You can change it up. 01:17:53.49 Mark McCracken Yeah. I mean, that's almost ironic is that book that says, uh, the book that I got recently. 01:17:53.95 Jess No. 01:17:56.82 Michael but I'm sitting there, I've got my iPad in one hand, and it's like, you need to be zen-focused. I'm scrolling red on the other one. 01:18:02.71 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:18:05.19 Michael Yeah, in TV, I started Jackal, I've got that going on. 01:18:08.92 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:18:10.77 Michael I think I've kind of slowed because my wife wants to watch it as well. so 01:18:14.43 Mark McCracken Uh, get a wit. 01:18:14.80 Michael way into it both ready and i've also been watching them i've been watching penguin yeah so penguin is on it's on i've got an rtv subscription and penguin penguin is like straight after um did you watch the batman it's just basically it's literally like straight after that and it's um it's really like yeah colin farrell's pretty good like when you can think like he's you know penguin's just like really american 01:18:19.62 Mark McCracken Ah! That's sky as well, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see him. 01:18:32.72 Mark McCracken Yes. 01:18:39.10 Mark McCracken His suit, yeah. Doesn't look like him at all, yeah. 01:18:44.16 Jess I just see Donita Rideau when I think Penguin. 01:18:44.43 Michael fuck Dublin in person, obviously. 01:18:46.23 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:18:47.25 Jess Is it Donita Rideau? 01:18:47.74 Michael You see, yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:18:48.25 Jess No. 01:18:49.52 Michael Yeah, he was, he was, yeah, so, yeah, that's what's, say and that's what I've been doing, so. 01:18:49.87 Jess ah 01:18:51.00 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:18:54.24 Mark McCracken look Very nice. 01:18:55.89 Jess I actually have a book, um which I haven't read yet, but umm I'm ah very excited to read because I went to a talk last night that the author was giving and it's on AI, um but it's on the the human impact of AI. 01:18:56.98 Mark McCracken Go on then. 01:19:04.66 Michael Yeah. 01:19:08.16 Jess So she went around the world and like interviewed people who are like impacted in some way. So like the the people in the like slums in India and some people in my room, sorry. 01:19:16.36 Michael Positive positively and negatively or like positively and negatively or okay. 01:19:20.85 Jess Yeah, both. um So like the people who are actually doing the tagging of the data um and getting you know paid sort of minimum wage and now like potentially going to be out of jobs because it now doesn't need the tagging of the data. 01:19:33.56 Michael Hmm. 01:19:35.32 Jess They need like people that doctors and scientists tagging more advanced things, not someone saying, yes, that's a cat, that's a dog, that's a boss, that's a, you know. 01:19:43.57 Mark McCracken Haven't we done enough of that with like a recapture? 01:19:43.88 Michael Yeah. 01:19:46.91 Michael yeah 01:19:47.34 Jess Well, we talked just talking about that with the girl I was sitting with, actually, we're like, I've been staring that off us for years, God damn it. But yeah, also like interesting things that are happening, like apparently Microsoft was helping the bloody Argentinian government or something build an AI system to predict like teen pregnancies and the slums of all the barriers and um things like that that are like a bit, you're like, well, there was some that might have been 01:20:14.00 Mark McCracken Do you need AI for that? Or can you just like look at how many there were in the recent history and guess? 01:20:19.32 Jess I was like, they're not they're not looking at the the wealthy population over here, they're specifically looking at the population over here in the poor part of the city. 01:20:28.26 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:20:29.32 Jess And, you know, there was another one which might have been China where they were like trying to predict um people who are going to be um going to have propensity for criminal activity and like putting them on a list. 01:20:33.46 Mark McCracken What's your book called? 01:20:38.79 Mark McCracken Yeah. Ooh. 01:20:40.59 Jess Yeah. 01:20:41.98 Michael this stuff This stuff goes way back, actually. 01:20:42.57 Mark McCracken That's taking a turn. 01:20:44.22 Michael this stuff There's doesn some really... Oh man, if you ever get a chance to read... off I'm gonna forget the guy's name. We're looking at... Do you ever watch Louis Theroux? 01:20:53.76 Jess Yes. 01:20:54.49 Mark McCracken Yeah, so awkward. 01:20:54.63 Michael There's someone who's like a kind of author version of Louis Theroux. um he He... I'm gonna look him up. He's called, yeah, John Ronson. If you ever get a chance to read his books, its it'ss it's they're really, really good. And he's he's got one... 01:21:12.60 Michael there was There was someone that was quite famous because they they they helped the police by working out which estates. ah so The police couldn't work out where to you know direct their attention. and And he was able to like use loads of data. like This is like early machine learning. He was able to use loads of data to work out where you know which parts of the population were more likely to have areas of crime. 01:21:42.48 Jess Right. 01:21:42.77 Michael I'm trying to remember which bits, but when when you look when you read it now, you're like, oh my God, this is like, this was in the sixties. 01:21:43.72 Mark McCracken yeah 01:21:49.17 Michael This is like, you know, yeah, ahead of its time stuff where you like look at, you know, different things like what newspapers people read and what people are buying and like, then correlating that to criminal activity. 01:21:50.97 Jess Ahead of its arm, yeah. 01:21:52.45 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:21:59.76 Jess doing all of that to it now. 01:22:00.91 Michael And I did definitely strong recommendation for that. 01:22:03.85 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:22:03.83 Michael So. 01:22:04.44 Jess The book anyway is called Code Dependent. 01:22:04.81 Mark McCracken Right. Well. 01:22:07.35 Mark McCracken Ah, good dependent. 01:22:08.75 Michael Code, code dependent. 01:22:11.56 Jess There was some positive stuff in there as well. 01:22:12.09 Mark McCracken okay 01:22:13.67 Jess but it was I was like, oh, this is fascinating. All the things you don't realise that are happening. 01:22:19.12 Mark McCracken All right, I think we're done. Wrap up. 01:22:21.77 Jess Cool. 01:22:23.08 Mark McCracken Wicked. 01:22:23.61 Jess That was fun. 01:22:23.84 Mark McCracken It's been a good time. 01:22:24.74 Jess Thanks. 01:22:25.04 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:22:25.05 Michael Yeah, I did that. 01:22:26.22 Mark McCracken Easy peasy. Yeah. Close rest. 01:22:28.56 Michael Cool. 01:22:28.60 Mark McCracken All right, we'll get this out there. And you're going to post it on LinkedIn and whatnot, Jess. You're going to start to give you something real to post. 01:22:31.55 Jess Oh god, what 01:22:33.92 Mark McCracken Yeah. 01:22:34.15 Michael Can you put it in your Myspace, Jess? 01:22:35.42 Mark McCracken Yeah, yeah. Put it in the MySpace. You've got to get it right on the marquee banner here. 01:22:39.57 Michael We should say, it should be when those programs were like, guess what, Jess? We dug out your Myspace. but 01:22:45.40 Jess Oh no! oh no 01:22:46.75 Mark McCracken A if-I-F-I-I-D-R-I-S-V-S. Next time, next time. 01:22:49.57 Michael yeah Cool. 01:22:50.22 Mark McCracken Alright, working. Cheers, folks. Catch you in a bit. 01:22:51.67 Jess so 01:22:52.34 Michael Have a good evening. 01:22:52.80 Mark McCracken Bye. 01:22:52.94 Michael Take care. How do I leave?